Lindsay Graham was right. “The Republicans are running out of angry old white guys.” This is their key demographic strength, their major constituency, middle aged white men with high-school or lower educations. They are dying off of stress-induced diseases and conditions, alcoholism, drug addiction, suicides, poisonings…

Between 1978 to 1998, the mortality rate for U.S. whites aged 45 to 54 fell by 2 percent per year on average, which matched the average rate of decline in the six countries shown, and the average over all other industrialized countries. After 1998, other rich countries’ mortality rates continued to decline by 2 percent a year. In contrast, U.S. white non-Hispanic mortality rose by half a percent a year. No other rich country saw a similar turnaround.

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That means “half a million people are dead who should not be dead,” Angus Deaton, the 2015 Nobel laureate in economics and co-author of the paper, told The Washington Post. “About 40 times the Ebola stats. You’re getting up there with HIV-AIDS.”

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/11/Screen_Shot_2015_11_03_at_11.47.51_AM/471a7929f.png

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/11/boomers-deaths-pnas/413971/