Life Expectancy

Some years back I noted here that rich people live four or five years longer than poor people in this country. This occurs--obviously--because rich people are so much wiser than poor people--the rich have the foresight to be born to wealthy parents. It follows that the wise people who own the country are best equipped to rule it. Now that might sound crass but it was, in fact, the position taken by the Federalist party, which was as astonished as Mitt Romney when the voters decided to hand over the Presidency to a commoner. 

Anyway, the remarkable difference between the life expectancy of the rich and poor recently reappeared in a column by Paul Krugman. He was commenting on the argument made by the Republicans (Federalists) that we should add a few years onto the age when people become eligible for social security because now Americans live longer. 

Americans, Krugman pointed out, live longer today if they are rich. If they work for a living, if they wait on tables or change the sheets in hotels or tend a vineyard, they are probably ready to retire at 65 and give their aching backs a rest. And they are apt to die soon enough. Let's not penalize the people who actually work because Bush cut the taxes on the wealthy and ran two wars on a credit card.