What cures the economic ills of "Flyover Country"/Middle/Rural America?

[HughBeaumont]

Pundits America-wide saw this election as a message that working/rural America has it perpetually awful in life and put their seemingly only chance at opportunity in an "outsider CEO" to be their savior (I'll wait for you to be finished doubled over laughing, but that's one of the narratives being tossed about). The idea was that Trump "had the stronger economic message".

. . . . . . I just read that as he straight up bullshitted his way to the voter's hearts in this area. Giving companies free money in the form of corporate tax cuts will inspire them to lay workers off by the metric ton.

He was never going to "bring jobs back". No one's going to bring jobs back. Corporate greed is a Pandora's box that ain't closing.

Search me how your precious Capitalism survives with no GMI, a chopped social safety net, the entrance fee to higher education being that of a mortgage and too few jobs for the millions of people that need them, but I'm sure the CEO Cabinet will figure it out

You don't really want to ask the people that live in these areas to "move"; that requires money and a job waiting for you, one that isn't always a guaranteed permanent. I'm just not understanding what these people are expecting to happen. I don't see how WE solve this. I don't really have any answers on how they're supposed to be gainfully employed.

The vague buzzwords thrown around by corporate America when asked what America's solution is to ward off an almost-certain bleak economic future . . . "innovation", "education", "information", "New Industries", "high tech businesses" . . . . would those, er, "solutions" ever happen in North Dakota? Iowa? Kansas? Ohio's counties that Hillary didn't win (all but seven)? Rural Pennsylvania?

The thing is, can permanently un/under-employed people "SUPERSIZE THEIR SKILL SET HAW HAW HAW" when they have no income to contribute for training? How does capitalism continue when you have millions of people who y'all won't hire and won't give them a substantial social safety net to even survive? This is expecting an individual solution to a structural problem.

I have YET, YET to hear a coherent and planned answer from a conservative as to how these problems get solved.

[guillaumeb]

1. Why assume that the GOP wants to solve a problem that GOP policies created?

A plantation-style economy works very well for the 1%. The GOP simply has to find something or someone to blame when their policies fail.

[Wounded Bear]

25. Why assume that the GOP wants to solve a problem that they profit from?

FIFY

[guillaumeb]

32. An excellent addition.

The planation style economy works well for 1% types all over the world. Why not here?

[Girard442]

26. The 1% learned their lesson very well in the 60's.

An affluent, optimistic, and educated middle class is nothing but trouble if you're a 1-percenter (more accurately a .01-percenter). Much better to have most of your population struggling, insecure, and ignorant. That way they're much easier to lead around by the nose by the Limbaughs and Hannitys of the world.

Think Haiti, where the tiny population of wealthy people live like kings in the midst of massive poverty.

[Else You Are Mad]

28. Exactly.

Why would they want a strong, unionized middle class that has the power to shut down production via strikes and contract negotiations -- both of which cost the .01% money? It's easier to have a poor working class that is willing to work for $10 an hour and cannot afford to strike?

[doc03]

2. As Sam Kinison would say you

don't have any food move out of the f----g desert.

[LonePirate]

6. Except they have no money to move to a more expensive place where they have no job waiting for them.

[doc03]

10. Their children that manage to go

to college are out of here soon as they graduate
The rest are screwed. I live here everyones kids are in Columbus or down south.

[JCMach1]

3. Other than Universal Income, the Left (Us) don't have much of a plan either...

The rich irony here is that neither Capitalism, or Socialism will work as the paradigm shifts.

We are going to have to organize our societies around something beyond the concept of work...

[HughBeaumont]

9. With a Teabagger Government at the helm?

That TeaGubmint's an almost permanent fixture when it comes to the House . . . unless we, by some miracle, win some state legislatures in the near future to combat the gerrymandering.

Government plays an intimate role in societal reorganization. When it doesn't cooperate, the molehill task becomes a mountain.

[JCMach1]

22. the good news is that the Right is even more clueless about this... still selling trickle down

and Gilded Age Robber Barons as a solution to the nation's problems.

Which essentially means the Elect get everything... everyone else, nothing.

[greymattermom]

4. People are moving

Just compare Kansas to Colorado

[Jean-Jacques Roussea]

5. Green Jobs

Turn all the empty unproductive space into solar farms and geothermo energy plants. We could get the entire country's net energy production in the positives so we won't need foreign oil anymore. Turn the entire state of Nevada into a solar panel and we could generate enough energy so that we could pay people to just sit around jacking off.
Of course, in this scenerio corporations wouldn't control them, and I'm basically describing a switch from a capitalistic republic democracy to a socialist noocracy, but a guy can dream.

[HughBeaumont]

11. Parts of Arizona can help in that regard too.

Of course, most of that land is state-owned . . . and we all know how Repubs feel about a resource they can't control with an iron fist.

[Bettie]

24. Actual farms and wind farms can coexist

and should. Plus, repairs and building of wind turbines would create jobs as well.

But, the right hates renewable energy, so that won't happen.

[Demsrule86]

7. Trade reform leading to decent jobs or it won't be pretty...there will literally

be revolution.

[Horse with no Name]

8. I work 10 hours a day

and commute 6 hours a day.

Is that sustainable?

[hollowdweller]

12. Well here's what I think.

First, if you look at the average age of a lot of the people that live there, it's old. So in a lot of these areas the labor pool is too small for a big plant or something.

Then if you drive thru a lot of these towns you can see old buildings, signs of the days when things were more prosperous.

If you look at the trends in the 60's and 70's you had people moving to the suburbs, you had the back to the land movement bringing people to the counntry.

Now, the trend is the opposite, people are moving to the cities.


I know this sounds ASS BACKWARDS, but before you can bring much businesses to an area you have to make it a place people would want to move before you are going to get any big business to move there.

I think you CAN get some small businesses started by improving internet and teaching skills to start your own businesses in school. A lot of the people in these areas were used to big employers and just going in and getting a job for life. No big tit is going to fall out of the sky and restore that right now.

Then I think that you need to provide decent roads and broadband there to help people start their own businesses.

After that there needs to be federal money pumped into the schools, infrastructure and in renovating small towns. Towns need movie houses, some place to congregate, live music, places to play sports.

We need to clean up and promote natural things like rivers, hiking and bike trails as draws.

Eventually living in cities will again be too expensive and people and businesses will be looking for cheap land and affordable housing for their employees. But these people won't move until the places have a civic life.

Sort of the sad thing about a lot of these places is they are sort of the victims of the GOP "every man for himself' philosophy, which has allowed towns and civic life to crumble for fear of raising taxes. So in a way people have brought it on themselves.
By moving to the burbs or just staying to themselves rather than participating in a civic life eventually the majority of the population who craves those things moves on.

So that is my idea. Make the areas worthy living in first, encourage the local population to start business and try to attract people from outside. Then improve the towns and civic life and eventually large employers and employees will move there.

[HughBeaumont]

16. This reminds me of my aunt's city in upper Maine.

Unique area; the further north you drive, in the area surrounding the various lakes, corporations and chains stop and you'll see nothing but local businesses. My aunt has a pretty high net worth and opened a bowling alley/restaurant/concert club in the town she lives in. This turned into a social area where people can congregate. That small town, situated on a lake, has a good day and night life for it's residents.

In Ohio, you very rarely see anything of this sort outside of big-city suburbs. The most rural towns and villages in this state have to offer are hole-in-the-wall dives and not much else.

[haele]

13. There isn't much to cure rural economic ills. There's no plan for options to Mayberry.

They're going to have to develop a new model, probably based on a mix of universal income and single payer health-care, along with a dedicated program that provides niche business development with a focus on agriculture, small/local manufacturing, and skilled crafts. There will also need to be a permanent investment in local infrastructure, including medical care; probably some sort of apprenticeship program where the government pays for expensive schooling in medical, law, environmental sciences, and teaching with a requirement for 4 - 6 year service obligation in a rural district.


The fact of the matter that politicians don't want to talk about is that there are very few larger employers that can be enticed into rural areas that can employ a significant number of working-aged able bodied adults to be able to make up for even half the losses of jobs in agriculture, resource extraction, or manufacturing over the past 50 years simply based on advancements in technology. Americans just have to understand that there will never again be the numbers of people required to do farming and manufacturing anymore - 150 acres of orchard or fields only need 5 people to plant or bring in a harvest on time instead of 30. Ranchers have RFID and GPS; two hands can do the job it took a dozen 40 years ago.
Factories that used to employ 2000 employees now only need 300; all the administration and logistics that used to require 50 to 100 clerks and secretaries are now handled by two admin assistants and a local network, and 2 - 6 workers can be dropped depending on how many stations were replaced and how many shifts the factory ran by just one robot and the one or two technicians hired to maintain it - and other robots.

However, a plan that addresses people who can't or don't want to move from rural areas where there are no jobs is pretty much nowhere in sight. No one want to talk about the problem; the assumption of rural inhabitants is that the politicians will just tell them to move from the dying towns if they can't make it, leaving the land open to corporate developers and forcing everyone who can't be of use to a corporation to live crammed into third world suburbs fighting for city-based service jobs with the urban and suburban inhabitants.
Basically, everyone knows that the frontier is gone; the outside world is everywhere and affects everyone. But no one wants to talk about what the options are for "Mayberry", if Mayberry is going to survive.
There needs to be an honest discussion both about the limits of living in the city and how to serve people who don't want to live in cities or suburbs, who thrive on the rural life, who can't handle being around a lot of people.
Just because one person has no problem with pushing paper and can make a career of networking, chasing clients and spending a lot of time sitting behind a desk doesn't mean everyone can live that life with dying a little inside every day. Some people thrive on chaos, some people require rigid order or they freak out; likewise some people love being in a crowd, and others need open spaces and a lot of time to think - and the majority of people fall in spectrums in between. We as a species need rural areas as well as being part of the herd.
So how do we as a country handle those who are better suited for rural life than they are urban life - without just writing them off as unprofitable lost causes? Despite what most corporate CEOs and other bean-counter types seem to think, people aren't fungible, and they certainly aren't disposable.
You can't just tell someone to "move to the city if you want a job" when they aren't capable of functioning anywhere else than where they are now.
So what are the options to Mayberry for the fly-overs?

Haele

[matt819]

14. You know what?

Last edited Wed Dec 14, 2016, 04:41 PM - Edit history (1)

I don't fucking care about the flyover states. As President Obama said, correctly, they cling to their religion and their guns. Let 'em.

Go over the rudepundit.blogspot.com and search for his recent pieces on Trump supporters, mainly in the flyover states. Brilliant.

[HughBeaumont]

17. I get the sentiment.

Can't really help people that blame all the wrong entities for their problems and stick their fingers in their ears when you try and explain to them who is really at fault (short of holding up a mirror, that is). They see themselves as one lucky break away from being Donald Trump rather than one missed paycheck from living under a bridge.

[Charles Bukowski]

15. Unemployment rate by state

Wisconsin - 4.1%
Michigan - 4.7%
Ohio - 4.9%
North Carolina - 4.9%
Pennsylvania - 5.8%

The best way to cure the economic ills of these Trump voting morons? Tell them to stop pretending they live in the Dust Bowl era, STFU, and go look for a job. They're out there - job openings are at 9 year highs.

[matt819]

18. I keep getting e-mails from LinkedIn

Telling me there are 89,000 new jobs in Boston. You idiots want work? Move to Boston. Get over the whole educated elite thing. Move. Get a job. And if you can't get a job, at least the New England states take care of those less fortunate, what with Medicaid, decent social services, education/training, etc. Sure, there aren't a lot of pickups with confederate flags and gun racks, but you'll get over it.

[Willie Pep]

19. I think the answer is to make "bad jobs" good.

Not everyone can be an engineer or a doctor. But there are policies that can be enacted that can help make some of our current "bad jobs" better. Universal health care (with a strong cost-control component) and stronger unions are just two things that would help.

Here is a good study on the issue: http://cepr.net/documents/publications/good-jobs-policy-2013-04.pdf

It is from 2013 but I think it is still relevant.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

31. yup. dont know why people act as though factory jobs were inherently good

they were not. they were made better by setting decent salaries and benefits

[Willie Pep]

33. Exactly.

When people think about good factory jobs they are thinking about the 1950s and 1960s when these jobs were heavily unionized. They forget that before unionization factory jobs were often dangerous, dirty and low-paying. That is one of my issues with Trump supporters. They think Trump will turn back the clock to 1950. Even if Trump could bring back a bunch of manufacturing jobs, he is anti-union and so it is likely that if he had his way these manufacturing jobs wouldn't pay well.

I think this is one of the big issues with right-wing nostalgia. They are nostalgic for the economic system of the post-World War II era but fail to realize that that was the heyday of unions and big government liberalism, not right-wing economics.

[bravenak]

20. They would have to be willing to move to different jobs

Or we would need to provide basic income. Those jobs are gone with the wind...

[JCMach1]

23. Move is the key term... jobwise and geographically... the jobs are not returning to rural America

[KamaAina]

21. I have been giving this some thought.

In the context of barnstorming Iowa in Paul Wellstone's old bus. 😀

Every county in America has an extension agent, whose job is to optimize agriculture in that county. Why not add one who does the same for industry, by analyzing the county's workforce, transportation, etc.?

I'll be down at the local diner chowing down on a loose meat sandwich. 😀

[0rganism]

27. there is no "cure" coming, but there will be plenty of scapegoating

actually fixing the mess would require policies that interfere with the planned wealth grabbing schedule
so the inhabitants of such places will have to make do with the low-budge alternative: finding liberals to blame for their problems
hey it might not keep the lights on, but at least they'll have something to do in the dark; i've heard burning books give a nice heat

[raccoon]

29. self-delete

[Dawson Leery]

30. Buy an Audi/Honda.

Obama was correct about fly over country.

I am not taking part in their bitter clinging to the old world. I will support land developers pushing into smaller towns.
Develop the land, bring in the population, and change them for the better.

Fuck country music (especially this bro-country trash)/nascar/football/wrestling/drinking/church. Be losers, go back the jungles and live like ignorant savages and suck on your cancer causing coal. I am a business owner, a member of the liberal, enlightened, civic society.