Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Those oh-so-effective Republican policies

This just in: Life expectancy decreasing in the United States. But not in all of America. As Karlo at Swerveleft notes, quoting an AP report on this study: What the new analysis reveals is the reality of two Americas, one on par with most of Europe and parts of Asia, and another no different than a third world nation. For example, previous research has shown that the U.S. state of Georgia has a life expectancy and infant mortality rate similar to the impoverished Eastern European nation of Georgia. In Harlem, African American men are less likely to reach the age of 65 than men in Bangladesh, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Disparities in life expectancy are increasing rapidly, with the West Coast and Northeast continuing to have improvements in life expectancy, while the Republican-dominated South and interior states stagnate or have declines in life expectancy.

In short, life expectancies are declining primarily in Republican-dominated areas like the state of Georgia that implement Republican policies, and are increasing primarily in areas like, say, the San Francisco Bay area, which implement liberal policies. In other words, liberalism is good for your health as well as your wealth -- it's no mistake that the states that have the highest concentration of liberals are also the wealthiest states, while the states that have the highest concentration of Republicans are the poorest states. Republican ideology simply isn't based on reality, and if you govern according to ideology rather than reality, you get the stark results of people dying. That's how it's always been, whether we're talking about Lenin's ideology or George W. Bush's ideology. Govern according to ideology rather than reality, and you end up with the life expectancy of the average American being only about 78 years, which places us 41st on the 2008 CIA World Factbook list, behind Bosnia but still edging out Albania.

Yay! We're #41! U S A! U S A! U S A! We may not be #1, but we're still better than Albania. WOOT!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

5 comments:

  1. In short, life expectancies are declining primarily in Republican-dominated areas like the state of Georgia that implement Republican policies, and are increasing primarily in areas like, say, the San Francisco Bay area, which implement liberal policies. In other words, liberalism is good for your health as well as your wealth...

    San Francisco is a dying city. It has no industry and the income gap between the wealthiest and the poorest is staggering. There literally is almost no middle class in SF. Just the rich and the people that serve them.

    And as far as life expectancy goes, please try telling that to the black youths of dozens of liberal-run cities across the country. Liberal policies have failed cities. They continue to do so when they offer elitest suggestions for improvements like attracting a 'creative class'.

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  2. "San Francisco is a dying city" in some alternative universe. My iceberg is docked thirty miles away from San Francisco. I visit San Francisco regularly. I have interviewed for jobs in San Francisco. San Francisco is one of the most dynamic cities on this planet, with a large number of high-tech industries designing computer gear, biotech, etc, with waiting lists for the posh new apartment complexes going up in the SoMa district where once warehouses stood, and with packed mass transit despite having the second best mass transit system in America (the best being, of course, New York City) with buses and trains every 5 minutes and never more than a two block walk to transit.

    I am wondering if you're in the same universe as I am. In this universe, FDR and his critics all defined FDR as liberal, and San Francisco is thriving. Maybe in Bizzaro World SF is dying, but so it goes.

    And BTW, I'm not "rich", and I don't serve the "rich". But if I wanted to, I could interview for jobs in SF in their many high-tech industries pretty much every weekday, and if I landed the job, I'd have no problem moving to SF and finding a nice place to live. I suggest you go to http://www.craigslist.org and view the list of apartments available, and remember that the average starting salary for a high tech worker in San Francisco is over $85/year so if you're in one of those impoverished Republican-dominated cities in the interior where $30K/year is a big salary, adjust your figures accordingly. You might also want to go to monster.com and see what jobs are available in San Francisco. I suspect you'd be suprised. "Rich and their servants"? Bwhahahah!

    Conservatives. Sigh. "Reality" and "conservative" simply don't go together in the same friggin' sentence, delusional, all of'em. Just bloody well delusional.

    - Badtux the San Francisco Bay Penguin

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  3. "San Francisco is a dying city" in some alternative universe. My iceberg is docked thirty miles away from San Francisco. I visit San Francisco regularly. I have interviewed for jobs in San Francisco. San Francisco is one of the most dynamic cities on this planet, with a large number of high-tech industries designing computer gear, biotech, etc, with waiting lists for the posh new apartment complexes going up in the SoMa district where once warehouses stood, and with packed mass transit despite having the second best mass transit system in America (the best being, of course, New York City) with buses and trains every 5 minutes and never more than a two block walk to transit.

    And BTW, I'm not "rich", and I don't serve the "rich". But if I wanted to, I could interview for jobs in SF in their many high-tech industries pretty much every weekday, and if I landed the job, I'd have no problem moving to SF and finding a nice place to live. I suggest you go to http://www.craigslist.org and view the list of apartments available, and remember that the average starting salary for a high tech worker in San Francisco is over $85/year so if you're in one of those impoverished Republican-dominated cities in the interior where $30K/year is a big salary, adjust your figures accordingly. You might also want to go to monster.com and see what jobs are available in San Francisco. I suspect you'd be suprised. "Rich and their servants"? Bwhahahah!


    You point to nothing but high-tech jobs for your proof that SF is a great city. That is one of the key problems. The job market is not diversified enough. There is little or no skilled manufacturing or other typically middle-class professions. The SF job market is only appealing to a narrow subset of workers.

    I would suggest you take the time to read any one of several dozen pieces that progressive author Joel Kotkin has written about the plight of American cities, specifically those older ‘superstar’ cities like San Francisco.

    Here are a few select comments:


    - San Francisco, despite its avowedly liberal, even radical politics, is becoming a particular poster child for social inequality–a cross, in the words of historian Kevin Starr, "between Carmel and Calcutta." The difference between African American and white incomes in this liberal bastion, for example, is almost three times the national average.

    - In cities like San Francisco, less than one tenth of households could afford a median-priced home; in Phoenix, one-third can do so, as can over half in Dallas, San Antonio, Charlotte, and Houston.

    - Urban centers that have been traditional favorites for young singles, such as Chicago, Boston, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, have experienced below-average job and population growth since 2000. San Francisco and Chicago lost population during that period.


    While SF may be attracting a lot of young, hip tech folks, it is losing population and jobs overall. A shrinking population and a shrinking tax base are the very definition of ‘dying’ for a city.

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  4. Uhm, what happened in 2001? Oh yeah, that's right, the DOT COM CRASH! The entire area lost population, not just San Francisco. And the population is back, BTW, as are incomes. And San Francisco is not going to gain much population, because, well, it's built out. There's no place to put more people inside San Francisco without turning warehouses into lofts. Which is happening.

    Also, the number of jobs and population in San Francisco has bounced back to above 2000 levels now. The jobs in 2000 were fed by phony money. These are not. We've learned. The days of companies being given $200M with nothing but a vague idea for a web site are long gone, these are real companies, producing real products and real innovation.

    Finally, San Francisco is part of an entire metropolitan area. There is still quite a bit of manufacturing going on in this metropolitan area. I should know. In my last job, I was the manufacturing process engineer, who designed the manufacturing processes, laid out the factory floor, etc., for a factory in Fremont building large storage devices. The city of San Francisco itself isn't the best place for manufacturing because it is at the wrong end of the transportation network -- you have to run a train all the way around the peninsula to get to San Francisco, which is why the port was moved to Oakland. But that's why my last employer had their factory in Fremont, right there at the end of the original transcontinental railway where it comes through the pass and close to the Port of Oakland. My current employer and their factory are in Mountain View, which is 30 miles from San Francisco. This is all part of the same metropolitan area.

    I've walked San Francisco. It's a small, very walkable city. I have lived all over the United States over the past twenty years, and I'll tell you this much -- compared to every Republican-dominated city that I've lived in, San Francisco is the most dynamic and livable city on the planet. Maybe somebody can cherry-pick some statistics saying otherwise by focusing on the year after the dot-com crash or focusing on San Francisco twenty years ago, but that was then, and this is now, and this metropolitan area that includes San Francisco is still one of the wealthiest and most dynamic in the nation. In short, somebody's got his head stuck up his butt and needs to come out here to reality instead of pulling shit out of his ass. And if you deny it, I'll tell you what -- show up at the San Jose Caltrain station, drop me a line, and I'll give you a tour of the area. Via mass transit. You'll be surprised.

    - Badtux the San Francisco Bay Penguin

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  5. I am quite familiar with SF. Our largest client is in Santa Clara. I've also spent time in most of the large cities of the US and many, many small ones. I DO appreciate the tour offer though.

    Perhaps I mispoke when i said SF is 'dying'. That is an unfair leap in adjectives. To be fair, SF is blessed in many ways (culture, location, etc) and will always be around. But as a model city into itself, SF proper is no longer functioning in the way that American cities once excelled in.

    Jane Jacobs, one of the great urban researchers of the 20th century said it best, "Cities don't lure the middle class, they create it." SF proper is no longer doing this. SF is a highly concentrated city of a small subset of people. It's middle class is shrinking violently and it is one of the only cities in the US where African Americans are dropping in numbers. I believe it also has the lowest birth rate of any large American city. There is a sort of quiet ethnic cleansing going on, as SF has decided, perhaps unconciously, that it seeks a fairly non-diverse group of residents and an economy built on tech and tourism alone.

    I can throw statistics at you all day long about SF's dwindling as traditional American city,but you seem content with it's status as a playground for the hip. That is fine, but many urbanists are beginnning to believe this is a model which only leads to further decline.

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