SEP 09, 2019
The top 400 richest Americans
have more wealth than the 150
million Americans in the bottom 60% of the country’s wealth
distribution, according to a January working paper from University of
California at Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman.
America’s rich
frequently pay lower taxes, use their money
to influence public policy and do not have to choose between paying
medical bills and paying their rent. They also don’t suffer the indignity of
having strangers comment on the groceries they purchase with SNAP benefits,
as Stephanie
Land describes in her memoir, “Maid.” Add to all this another benefit
of wealth, according to a new study from the
Government Accountability Office: a longer lifespan.
Even as life expectancy in
general is on the rise, it “has not increased uniformly across all income
groups, and people who have lower incomes tend to have shorter lives than those
with higher incomes,” the report reveals.
Both poor and middle-class
Americans are less likely than the wealthy to live into their 70s and 80s, the
GAO found. More than 75% of the wealthiest Americans who were in their 50s in
1991 were still alive in their 70s in 2014. By contrast, less than half of the
poorest 20% of 50-somethings surveyed were alive by the same year.
The GAO report attributes this
discrepancy to multiple factors, including a large gap in retirement savings
and a lack of assets like homes to draw on to help offset unexpected costs for
lower-income Americans. This causes a dependence on Social Security benefits to
pay bills of all kinds, including medical bills.
The GAO report’s results echo
previous studies on the relationship between wealth and lifespan in America.
A 2016
study by economists from Stanford, Harvard and McKinsey and Co, among
others, found that “In the United States between 2001 and 2014, higher income
was associated with greater longevity, and differences in life expectancy
across income groups increased over time.” Low-income residents in wealthier
areas, however, tended to live longer than residents of uniformly poor
communities, with a difference of up to 15
years for men, and up to ten for women.
A University of
Washington study from
2017 found the gap could vary by up to 20 years depending on the region of the
United States.
“Over time, the top fifth of
the income distribution is really becoming a lot wealthier — and so much of the
health and wealth gains in America are going toward the top,” Harold Pollack, a
health care expert at the University of Chicago who is not affiliated with the
report told the
Post. He called those disparities “a failure of social policy.”
Senator and presidential
candidate Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., commissioned the GAO report in 2016, The
Washington Post explains, after meeting with residents of MacDowell County,
W.Va., where, Sanders aides tell the Post, the average life expectancy is 64 years
old.
“We are in a crisis never
before seen in a rich, industrialized democracy,” Sanders said in a statement.
“For three straight years, overall life expectancy in the wealthiest nation in
the history of the world has been in decline.” He adds, “If we do not urgently
act to solve the economic distress of millions of Americans, a whole generation
will be condemned to early death.”
Read the entire GAO
report here.
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