Disabled, or just desperate? Rural Americans turn to disability as jobs dry up

[Blanks]

1. It's Reagan's fault...

All of these small communities across the country used to have small family farms, small town banks, implement sales and all of the supporting jobs that go along with a community that has an 'export product'. The logging industry had the same kind of collapse too.

Nixon's agriculture policy was 'go big or go home' and they loaned money to farmers and made sure they borrowed more than they needed. Then we had big time inflation (Nixon even signed an EO forbidding everyone from raising prices) and Carter inherited this inflation, so he appointed Volcker to the FED and he raised interest rates. It brought inflation under control, but since Reagan didn't have any kind of plan to assist the small farmer with 18% interest on the loans that they'd been getting under Nixon's 'go big or go home' policy, so these small communities economies collapsed. All across the country.

It's why I keep saying that we need to reinvigorate these small communities as a matter of national security. We need to divert defense spending to getting these communities on a track to being more sustainable. If we have failing infrastructure in a couple of key locations across the country, these small towns don't have the local resources to survive for an extended period of time. They should be the supply line for the urban areas nearby on a lot of different levels, but they have been allowed to disintegrate for almost 40 years.

Of course, these small town folk could just move to a place where the jobs are, but I think it's in our nation's long term best interest to bring back these small town American communities economic health.