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Happiness is on the Wane in the US, UN Global Report Finds (theguardian.com)
From a report on The Guardian, shared by five anonymous readers: Happiness in the US is declining and is expected to continue on a downward path, with Donald Trump's policies forecast to deepen the country's social crisis. The US has slipped to 15th place in the World Happiness Report 2017, produced by the United Nations. The world's economic superpower is well behind top-ranked Norway, although it remains above Germany in 17th place, the UK in 19th, and France in 32nd. Norway knocked Denmark off the top spot as the world's happiest country, with Iceland and Switzerland rounding out the top four. The report's authors stress, however, that the top four are so close that changes are not statistically significant. The next tier of countries are regular leaders in international happiness surveys: Finland is in fifth place, followed by the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Sweden. The world's "unhappiest" countries are all in the Middle East and Africa: war-stricken Yemen and Syria feature in the bottom 10, with Tanzania, Burundi and Central African Republic making up the final three.
As a moderate conservative, I was happy with Obama and would've been happy with Hillary. None of the 16 Republican candidates in 2016 made me happy, which was why I switched my political registration to Democratic in late 2015. Now we're stuck with sore loser Donald Trump, who is neither a conservative nor Republican, and, until a few short years ago, was a Clinton Democrat. Sad!
Per usual for this report they use non-normalized data for things like generosity and life expectancy.
I didn't see in TFA any mention of *who* and how has forecast that Donald Trump's policies will deepen the country's social crisis. But I've noticed the sources The Guardian quoted in the past were those who forecast Hillary's victory and people like the Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman whose forecast was "if Trump wins the market will crash and will *never* recover".
I'm not laughing. Neither are a lot of people who voted for the sonofabitch, either, and neither are a whole bunch of the GOP.
You're projecting. Trump is doing an amazing job of keeping his campaign promises, and his supporters are very happy about it. They did a straw poll at CPAC and something like 90% of conservatives agreed with what Trump was doing.
Yes, the neocon assholes on TV like Bill Kristol and John McCain are mad. But these are the same people the Trump voters rebelled against because they see them as traitors.
Oh and by the way I'd like to point out that Angela Merkel was called 'Leader of the Free World' by the press last week;
Who the hell cares? Fuck the press.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The USA will rise again. Unfortunately, that's because the damage Trump et. al will do will damage lots of other countries so they sink. Basically, everyone will get more unhappy which will make the USA look less bad.
Slashing the State Department budget coupled with a crazy hike in military spending... you'd have to be stupid not to see that Bannon et. al. mean to lead the United States into war.
Trump isn't the cause, he's a symptom. People feel threatened, they get tribal and mean... and they tend to do stupid things that make the problems causing them to feel threatened get worse.
Trump was elected over economic fear. Fear of the 1% (whose frankly ludicrous levels of wealth get thrown in our face by the media daily... and those aren't even the richest tier of people), fear of foreigners stealing our jobs.
So... vote in Trump to keep out the foreigners and stop the 1%ers in Washington. Which damages the economy and it turns out the kind of guy you vote in to the top position actually wants to line his own pockets and those of his (significant) supporters... the 1%.
It's a global problem because the same socioeconomic forces are driving the same mob reactions around the world.
and a huge cut in public services for everybody else. This isn't rocket science. Elections have consequences. 22 million will lose health care under Trump (getting a paltry $3000 tax credit in it's place). There are massive cuts to science programs coming. The EPA is getting slashed. Water will be less clean, and in poorer cities contaminated with lead. Air will be dirtier. Kids will get asthma. These things will happen. It's got nothing to do with Red/Blue. It's just what happens when you deregulate. Those regulations weren't made to spoil anyone's fun. They were made to solve problems.
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Poor people are living longer, earning more, eating more, all over the world
Not in the United States.
Life expectancy in the US is declining. https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Also, real income went down in the 2008 recession, and have not recovered for anyone not in the top 2% of incomes.
Also, food insecurity is up by quite a bit among the poor.
That's completely and utter non-sense. The U.S. Federal Government's primary reason to exist is to enable the pursuit of happiness. They help build roads which allow you to move from place to place, they create law enforcement frameworks so you have consistency across the union.
In more recent history they cleaned up the rivers and lakes that were so polluted they would catch on f'in fire. This hate of government bs is what got us where we are with our current President. It is stupid, government can does certain things well, there are certainly things it should not do as well. That is why we have a legislature and a Supreme court and even a President.
I hate this I got mine so screw everybody else crap. We are by far the richest country in the world and yet we are gonna make our children go hungry because we somehow can't afford to feed them? We are gonna kick millions off healthcare and discourage younger people from obtaining insurance and penalizing them if they get the balls to get try and get it so we are gonna kill more and more hospitals as uninsured people show up again.