At Least Now President Trump Knows Who 'CBC' Is
Yet I could not help but notice how much the relationship between Trump and other Washington players, including black congressional Democrats, has changed. The White House meeting took place while House Republicans were trying in vain to hammer out an Obamacare replacement bill on which they could agree.
What a difference an election makes. Suddenly it is President Trump who is trying to do what President Barack Obama failed to do: win cooperation from Republicans who don't think his health care goals are conservative enough.
In another significant coincidence on the day of Trump's CBC meeting, the Brookings Institution announced a new follow-up to a 2015 report by Princeton professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton that made global headlines after documenting a shocking rise in the proportion of white non-Hispanic Americans dying in middle age.
In a finding that matches the national conversation about the uprising of Trump voters, Case and Deaton discovered that midlife mortality rates continue to fall among all education classes in most of the rich world -- except for middle-aged non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. with a high school diploma or less.
Non-college whites have experienced increasing midlife mortality since the late 1990s at such a high rate, say Case and Deaton, that their mortality rates have grown from being 30 percent lower than those of African-Americans in 1999 to become 30 percent higher than blacks in 2015.
Add that to the growing body of evidence that non-college whites in particular have been passed over by today's global economic change and we can see the income inequality and other problems on the CBC agenda are by no means limited to blacks only.
With that in mind, Trump might find the report from the CBC, which likes to call itself "the conscience of the Congress," to be helpful in bringing struggling people of all races together around our shared economic challenges -- if he ever gets around to reading it.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
(c) 2017 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
