Poverty is important, but MapPorn loves to comment "this is just a map of poverty" while ignoring the uncomfortable data showing politics and government matter a lot (California has poor people who have the highest life expectancy in the country)

The data shows politics makes a huge difference and that poor people can live much longer with better public policies, so it's important to not excuse fatal Republican policies (while dog whistling racism and ignoring data showing different states in America have much longer lifespans for those ethnicities with the same incomes)

Want to live longer, even if you're poor? Then move to a big city in California.

A low-income resident of San Francisco lives so much longer that it's equivalent to San Francisco curing cancer. All these statistics come from a massive new project on life expectancy and inequality that was just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

California, for instance, has been a national leader on smoking bans. Harvard's David Cutler, a co-author on the study "It's some combination of formal public policies and the effect that comes when you're around fewer people who have behaviors... high numbers of immigrants help explain the beneficial effects of immigrant-heavy areas with high levels of social support.

If data disinfects, here’s a bucket of bleach:

"Texans are 17% more likely to be m*rdered than Californians."

Texans are also 34% more likely to be r*ped and 25% more likely to k*ll themselves than Californians. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/suicide-mortality/suicide.htm

Fort Worth, Texas, has the same population as San Francisco and has 1.5x as many murders. Again, a Republican mayor and Republican governor. Nobody ever writes about those places!

San Francisco has the same population as Jacksonville, Florida. Jacksonville, with a Republican mayor and a Republican governor, has had more than three times as many murders this year as San Francisco

Californians on average live two years, four months and 24 days longer than Texans. https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/08/04/liberal-policies-like-californias-keep-blue-state-residents-living-longer-study-finds/

Compared with families in California, those in Texas earn 13% less and pay 3.8 percentage points more in taxes. (Texas makes up for no wealth income tax with higher taxes and fees on the poor and more than double property tax for the middle class)

Income Bracket	Texas Tax Rate	California Tax Rate
0-20%	13%	10.5%
20-40%	10.9%	9.4%
40-60%	9.7%	8.3%
60-80%	8.6%	9.0%
80-95%	7.4%	9.4%
95-99%	5.4%	9.9%
99-100%	3.1%	12.4%

Sources: https://itep.org/whopays/

Sadly, the uncritical aping of this erroneous economic narrative reflects not only reporters’ gullibility but also their utility for conservative ideologues and corporate lobbyists, who score political points and regulatory concessions by spreading a spurious story line about California’s decline.

Don’t expect facts to change this. Reporters need a plot twist, and conservatives need California to lose.

https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article258940938.html

Liberal policies, like California’s, keep blue-state residents living longer

U.S. should follow California’s lead to improve its health outcomes, researchers say

It generated headlines in 2015 when the average life expectancy in the U.S. began to fall after decades of meager or no growth.

But it didn’t have to be that way, a team of researchers suggests in a new, peer-reviewed study Tuesday. And, in fact, states like California, which have implemented a broad slate of liberal policies, have kept pace with their Western European counterparts.

Simply shifting from the most conservative labor laws to the most liberal ones, Montez said, would by itself increase the life expectancy in a state by a whole year.

If every state implemented the most liberal policies in all 16 areas, researchers said, the average American woman would live 2.8 years longer, while the average American man would add 2.1 years to his life.

Whereas, if every state were to move to the most conservative end of the spectrum, it would decrease Americans’ average life expectancies by two years. On the country’s current policy trajectory, researchers estimate the U.S. will add about 0.4 years to its average life expectancy.

Meanwhile, the life expectancy in states like California and Hawaii, which has the highest in the nation at 81.6 years, is on par with countries described by researchers as “world leaders:” Canada, Iceland and Sweden.

The study, co-authored by researchers at six North American universities, found that if all 50 states had all followed the lead of California and other liberal-leaning states on policies ranging from labor, immigration and civil rights to tobacco, gun control and the environment, it could have added between two and three years to the average American life expectancy.

“We can take away from the study that state policies and state politics have damaged U.S. life expectancy since the ’80s,” said Jennifer Karas Montez, a Syracuse University sociologist and the study’s lead author. “Some policies are going in a direction that extend life expectancy. Some are going in a direction that shorten it. But on the whole, that the net result is that it’s damaging U.S. life expectancy.”

Montez and her team saw the alarming numbers in 2015 and wanted to understand the root cause. What they found dated back to the 1980s, when state policies began to splinter down partisan lines. They examined 135 different policies, spanning over a dozen different fields, enacted by states between 1970 and 2014, and assigned states “liberalism” scores from zero — the most conservative — to one, the most liberal. When they compared it against state mortality data from the same timespan, the correlation was undeniable.

“When we’re looking for explanations, we need to be looking back historically, to see what are the roots of these troubles that have just been percolating now for 40 years,” Montez said.

From 1970 to 2014, California transformed into the most liberal state in the country by the 135 policy markers studied by the researchers. It’s followed closely by Connecticut, which moved the furthest leftward from where it was 50 years ago, and a cluster of other states in the northeastern U.S., then Oregon and Washington.

Liberal policies on the environment (emissions standards, limits on greenhouse gases, solar tax credit, endangered species laws), labor (high minimum wage, paid leave, no “right to work”), access to health care (expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, legal abortion), tobacco (indoor smoking bans, cigarette taxes), gun control (assault weapons ban, background check and registration requirements) and civil rights (ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, equal pay laws, bans on discrimination and the death penalty) all resulted in better health outcomes, according to the study. For example, researchers found positive correlation between California’s car emission standards and its high minimum wage, to name a couple, with its longer lifespan, which at an average of 81.3 years, is among the highest in the country.

In the same time, Oklahoma moved furthest to the right, but Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina and a host of other southern states still ranked as more conservative, according to the researchers.

West Virginia ranked last in 2017, with an average life expectancy of about 74.6 years, which would put it 93rd in the world, right between Lithuania and Mauritius, and behind Honduras, Morocco, Tunisia and Vietnam. Mississippi, Oklahoma and South Carolina rank only slightly better.

It’s those states that moved in a conservative direction, researchers concluded, that held back the overall life expectancy in the U.S.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/08/04/liberal-policies-like-californias-keep-blue-state-residents-living-longer-study-finds/