Aside from US Stocks, Ditching of Citizenship and (Sadly) Middle Age Suicides have been Booming!

In the US, the Federal Reserve has not only powered a boom in stocks, but to many other financial areas such as  ‘record high’ commercial real estate prices and lately to ‘record high’ issuance of corporate bonds.

 

But there are other non financial aspects that seem to be booming too…

One, the ditching of American citizenship. Writes Sovereign Man’s Simon Black.

1,426. That’s the number of Americans who renounced their US citizenship last quarter according to the US government’s report just released this morning.

That’s a record high for a single quarter, easily beating the last record high set earlier this year, which beat the previous record high set in 2013.

This is clearly a trend on the rise, and it certainly raises the question: why?

What is it about the United States that drives so many citizens to leave?

Two main reasons:

The first group consists of people who just can’t take it anymore. Constant warfare, intimidation, and the steady erosion of freedom have pushed them to their breaking points.

They look around and think, “This is NOT the country that I grew up in.” And they renounce their citizenship in protest of a government they no longer want to be associated with.

But that’s a small percentage of former citizens.

For the vast majority of people who renounce their US citizenship, it ultimately comes down to a single issue: taxes.

Second, (sadly) middle age suicides.

From the New York Times

Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.

That finding was reported Monday by two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton, who last month won the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in for Economic Science, and Anne Case. Analyzing health and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from other sources, they concluded that rising annual death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse:alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids….

Taken together, they concluded that suicides, drugs, and alcohol explained the overall increase in deaths. The effect was largely confined to people with a high school education or less. In that group, death rates rose by 22 percent while they actually fell for those with a college education.

It’s not clear why only middle-aged whites had such a rise in their mortality rates. Dr. Meara and Dr. Skinner, in their commentary, considered a variety of explanations — including a pronounced racial difference in the prescription of opioid drugs and their misuse, and a more pessimistic outlook among whites about their financial futures — but say they cannot fully account for the effect.

Well, suicides have been one of the  side effects of economic depression/financial crisis, as previously discussed.  

Perhaps, the “more pessimistic outlook…about their financial futures” as cause/s to some of the suicides could have been an outcome of the divergence between Wall Street  and main street from policies of inflationism. As per JP Keynes: By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some.

And once another crisis emerge, such deplorable developments could even increase.