Marriage Equality is an Awesome Thing. Too Bad No One Can Afford to Get Married

Kind of a cart-before-the-horse deal, isn't it:

Unemployment is almost always a traumatic event, especially for older workers. A paper by the economists Daniel Sullivan and Till von Wachter estimates a 50 to 100 percent increase in death rates for older male workers in the years immediately following a job loss, if they previously had been consistently employed. This higher mortality rate implies that a male worker displaced in midcareer can expect to live about one and a half years less than a worker who keeps his job.

There are various reasons for this rise in mortality. One is suicide. A recent study found that a 10 percent increase in the unemployment rate (say from 8 to 8.8 percent) would increase the suicide rate for males by 1.47 percent. This is not a small effect. Assuming a link of that scale, the increase in unemployment would lead to an additional 128 suicides per month in the United States. The picture for the long-term unemployed is especially disturbing. The duration of unemployment is the dominant force in the relationship between joblessness and the risk of suicide.

Joblessness is also associated with some serious illnesses, although the causal links are poorly understood. Studies have found strong links between unemployment and cancer, with unemployed men facing a 25 percent higher risk of dying of the disease. Similarly higher risks have been found for heart disease and psychiatric problems.

Repeat after me: none of this needs to be happening. None of this needs to be happening. None of this needs to be happening. The only reason why it is happening is because, well, because our leaders either don't recognize the problem, or they simply don't care: Which is to say, they're either Democrats or Republicans. Regardless, this isn't happening accidentally, i.e., the Romneyfication of our private-sector economy is working exactly as intended, and everyone in Washington who isn't working to solve the problem is guilty to a degree in engaging in a form of theft against an entire generation of Americans. Two generations, actually, considering that young people are getting fucked over even more than the elderly.

But having a huge number of older workers out of the labor force is arguably worse economically because, (a) they're your most experienced workers, and (b) they're going to need more health care than younger workers, and now they have no viable means to pay for it.

---Vitelius

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