It's lack of opportunity. What is your answer to that? Tesla isn't opening up a factory in New Hampshire anytime soon. There certainly isn't as many amazing colleges such as UC berkley there. Throwing money into unemployment and welfare won't solve the problem at all.

Trump literally said I will fight to get you jobs back. Ignore if that is true. Ignore if he is an idiot. Ignore if that works in the long term. He was the only candidate that actually said a single idea that was directly aimed at helping them.

In generations past, Americans picked up and moved to where the opportunity was, rather than staying put. Why is it unreasonable to expect the same now?

The economy has permanently changed - those jobs are never coming back. On the other hand, moving is far, far easier in 2017 than it was for those on the Oregon Trail or the Mayflower.

They would be an extreme disadvatantage. Now I don't disagree that that may be a solution, but seriously take a step back. Ask yourself if you think you just said is empathatic towards people in rural America?

Ask yourself if you had said that about other issues in America. 'Why can't black people just start learning how to code to catch up?' 'Why can't gays just get over not being able to be officially married?'

Basically what you're saying is 'why cant people that aren't me adapt to how I operate?'

I don't have to imagine it. There are 8 cities between my great-grandfather and me.

- Russia (we don't know what city), where my great-grandfather was born.

- St. Louis, where my great-grandfather settled as a refugee from the pogroms (he was Jewish).

- Chicago, where my great-grandfather relocated for work and my grandfather did undergrad->PhD.

- Seattle, where my grandfather moved after graduation and met my grandmother from Ottawa.

- Lawrence, KS., where my grandfather got his faculty job and where my parents met.

- Rochester, NY. where my parents moved after college.

- Milwaukee, WI. because the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle was written during the evenings and delivered in the afternoon, while the Milwaukee Journal was written during the business day and delivered the following morning. My dad was a journalist and my mom was a teacher (they have both changed careers now) and they wanted to have dinner together.

- Chicago again, where I went to college.

- Berkeley, CA. where I now live for my software engineering job in San Francisco.

My family is privileged in many ways (white skin, tradition of going to college, supportive households, etc). But no one in my family's history has had the incredible privilege of being born in a place that remains suitable for an entire lifetime, much less multiple generations of lifetimes. I cannot even comprehend what it would be like to be born in a place I could stay in forever while having a decent career. That must be nice if you can get it.

In terms of public policy, I'd consider that kind of luxury to be on par with owning a vacation home. Yeah, it'd be nice if everyone could have that, but there are much more pressing problems to solve.

Now imagine telling a corporation that 'you must build your factory only in City X' -- why should they? They will build where they find space at good rents and an industrial ecosystem and workers.

What if the factory owner lives in California. So he has to move his life across the country and build in New Hampshire because a rural worker in New Hampshire didn't want to move themselves? How does this make sense?

Viewed by the capitalist system, these communities are useless. People hate feeling useless, even if you give them everything they need to live (the Democrat's solution)

So, how do you make economically irrelevant communities viable?

I have no idea.

The basic income movement beneath a lot of this is meant to, over generations, migrate the culture from one where your work defines your value as a human being to one where you are valued for your non-monetary contributions to society as well.

We will have to do these things due to climate change anyway (create policies to handle migration) if the Agricultural Revolution is to ultimately win over Nomadism, we may as well figure out things that work here and now.

There are plenty of English reading/writing/speaking people in India capable of remote work.

I don't run a factory, but I am a full-time co-founder of a startup. There is no way I'd move our NYC-based operation to some rural area, there is little to no specialized technical community outside the major cities. For example, would I be able to attend weekly Machine Learning meetups in West Virginia? Would I be able to have lunch regularly with VCs in Ohio? I've been overseas doing a parallel medical trial, in a big city, and still it is very difficult to operate here. The depth of community just doesn't exist.

I realize a tech startup isn't a perfect example, but I imagine some of the same concerns would be applicable to factory owners. It is simply not realistic to assume that employers (who already don't have trouble finding talent) should move to where workers are, rather than the opposite.

Yes. There is a fantastic, burgeoning startup community in Ohio. One that seems to be getting traction is Root, an really innovative insurance company (I'm not affiliated with Root).

Reality doesn't really care about consideration.

Are God and Nature then at strife,

That Nature lends such evil dreams?

So careful of the type she seems,

So careless of the single life;

That I, considering everywhere

Her secret meaning in her deeds,

And finding that of fifty seeds

She often brings but one to bear,

I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my weight of cares

Upon the great world's altar-stairs

That slope thro' darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,

And gather dust and chaff, and call

To what I feel is Lord of all,

And faintly trust the larger hope.

-Tennyson

It's not a matter of empathy. There are laws of economics at play. The free market chooses the most competitive products and the most competitive products are made in economic centers. Capitalism favors cities. These economic forces are forces of nature, and opposing them is like opposing the laws of physics.

Now, the government can step in to pump money into rural areas in various ways (direct investment, tax credits, etc.), to make their products more competitive. But that's unsustainable, and once you turn on the spigot you can't turn it off without hurting people even more. You want to know what it looks like when the government makes a determination on which areas are going to make which things, market competition be damned, for social reasons? It looks like the Soviet Union.

We live in some very weird times if Republicans are getting elected to promote Soviet economic policy in America.

Also the overall standard of living is lower in cities than in rural areas for non-1% job categories. You'll make maybe 10% more money while paying 20% more and living in higher crime and worse conditions as a welder, for example.

Its not even clear for "computer people" that the overall standard of living is better in a city. We all know there's only one politically correct thing to say about urbanism, but there's a difference between being required to say under social duress vs actually is.

I'm not sure what this means, can you expand on this?

I agree that people should move, but circumstances are different today.

I'd love to see more sociology and economic research in how towns die and recover. Tons of money studies urban poverty and decay, and I suspect rural poverty and decay doesn't get nearly the same attention because it's out of sight and out of mind for those funding the research.

Transportation is easier - but lets face it, it takes money to move now just like it took money to move back then. This is the entire reason we can't expect folks to just be able to move. There aren't jobs coming back, so they have no income. If they are lucky, they make minimum wage. And to make more money, they have to save up first month's rent, deposit, utility deposits, plus the actual moving expenses. All this for a city likely to be more expensive than their rural location. It isn't much wonder why folks aren't moving more often.

Sure, one could find work in the nearest town, but that takes commute money. If one has a friend they can live with, that helps, but many don't.

Sanford Health is particularly noticeable - there are multiple hospitals and research centers there or under construction.

I believe the banking is mostly credit card companies and cheque printing.

It's got a surprising number of amenities for a small city and if you can stand the location and politics it's got relatively high wages and low cost of living.

Sioux Falls is actually a pretty nice town. SD is a bit strange because the capital of the state is such a small town. SD also has no state income taxes for individuals or businesses.

Trump is right to identify insufficient aggregate demand as the cause of unemployment in the midwest and underemployment pretty much everywhere. The culprit is much more China than Mexico. If the administration can significantly reduce the trade deficit it will have very positive effects on US employment and income.

You can accomplish far more today with the advances in robotics and logistics than you could 30 or even 20 years ago.

This is an example of a brewery working at full capacity with a total of 6 people per shift. If this brewery was operated 35 years ago it would be 600 people per shift.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tLim5pkfOw

So how exactly are you going to stop these owners of capital that are so rightfully praised in the United States? You have entire cities that will offer free electricity, massive tax incentives, and looser regulations for what? A couple hundred jobs? What about the tens of thousands of people that are out of work? Are we really going to subsidize hundreds of thousands of tax dollars for jobs that barely pay $15/hour?

I don't know what the solution is but I do know it will require massive amounts of tax dollars and it won't be the poor paying it.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/upshot/the-long-term-jobs...

Edited to recognize the open debate on illegal immigration. I don't understand how illegal immigration could lead to a better job outlook for the lower class. If anyone has some info on that, I'd appreciate it.

This seems a bit counter-intuitive to me, could you point me to any research?

Without them, we'd have fewer workers competing for jobs, which seems like a good thing, but we'd also have fewer jobs to go around because of decreased consumption.

Unfortunately, the problem is not about keeping any particular job so much as keeping the American economy vibrant enough to create new jobs as the old ones disappear. This requires the economy to operate at full employment, which requires adequate aggregate demand, which requires... well... there's your problem with the massive trade deficit and Chinese protectionism. Put more simply, if the Chinese were purchasing as much from the United States as they were selling into it, there would be a lot more job opportunities in the industries selling to China. Those would drive up wages and create competition to hire those newly unemployed.

Incidentally, it is worth remarking on the fact that China is going through the same pattern of automation and labor dislocation as the United States. The country also has an endemic problem with rent-capture and corruption that works against an efficient private sector. Despite this, the economy is doing much better at job creation largely because of the country's mercantilism: its politically engineered trade surplus ensures adequate demand in the southern export-oriented parts of the economy, while state control of the financial sector serves to redistributes gains from trade to the SOE sector etc.

Factories were built where it was cheap or where the founders decided, but to be fair, as close to people as possible.

If people are willing to schlep they have the opportunity to feel purpose and a sense of accomplishment, but if they're going to sit idle and/or get wasted, that's the surest path to rusty irrelevancy. Folks need to bootstrap themselves and find/invent useful contribution to society that can turn a profit, rather than expecting someone to show up and hand it to them.

http://mikerowe.com/2016/02/stopignoringskillsgap/

As far back as the 1800's towns have "died" when the rail road went a different way. That isn't a new phenomena.

But looking at what works historically and what doesn't, the 'new' thing now is the Internet which makes a lot of things possible that weren't before. If you can get 40 gbits of capacity pulled into a 'rural town' then you can build an office building where everyone can connect pretty seemlessly to an office anywhere else. You can build customer support there, you can build logistics tracking systems, you can build R&D facilities. If you do this a there will be a complaint that you are 'ruining' the town.

A complaint I hear often is people want to work in tech but they want a place where they can buy a house and raise a family. That could be the lure of rural America if the state would fund fiber infrastructure to the town.

I wonder how costly a fiber "plant" is? What's stopping the US from a "roll out the fiber" New Deal-style project?

Adding water, power, freeways, and airports all cost more, and generate fewer net commercial opportunities.

Monopoly service areas for universal service offering was the deal.

There is none. The entire history of civilization is a shift of economic activity from outside of cities to cities, and, in terms of long term trends, is unlikely that ever changes in the foreseeable future.

"Rural America" can't, really, have it's fortunes reversed any more than obsolete industries in urban America can; all that can be done in either case is to help people transition out of them. That's perhaps not the answer people want to hear, but anyone saying anything else is lying to exploit their pain and probably facilitating their destruction.

The main draw of cities is higher wages and greater social activity, but these are things that are decreasingly necessary to do in person, especially as VR adoption increases. As it becomes more possible to work and socialize online/in VR the incentives could shift so that it makes more sense for people to work online in high paying information worker jobs but paired with the low cost of living out in the countryside.

If this is the case it would be an interesting reversal of the current historical trend towards greater centralization, but this kind of decentralization wouldn't be unprecedented. I think you greatly overstate the extent to which rural America is doomed. If anything, it would seem that as economic opportunities become more evenly distributed over the globe due to the proliferation of information technology that people would come to prefer living rurally, especially since evidence suggests that people living in rural areas are happier on average[1].

[1] http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/06/the-price-of-happines...

But I'd at least like to see some people in the cities say 'we honestly don't care about rural people and they need to adapt'. That would sit better with me.

Not necessarily. It might be possible and even desirable to slow some aspects of it down, but not wind the clock in reverse.

> But I'd at least like to see some people in the cities say 'we honestly don't care about rural people and they need to adapt'.

It's not a matter of not caring about rural people (or urban people who have been surviving off industries that are on the way out, or that once survived off industries that are gone that they wish would come back); caring about the people demands dealing with them honestly and doing the things that can mitigate harms to them from the transition, not trying to pretend that the world is going to rewind to some past state for them.

I hung out with plenty of 1%er conservatives (rural Connecticut hedge fund) and plenty of progressives (in my neighborhood in Brooklyn.) I rarely saw any empathy amongst wealthy, elite sub-urbanite hedge fund crowds.

As for quick-fixes, the only quick fix I've seen so far is one that will come at a huge cost -- deregulating environmental controls. I agree this will seriously increase rural job opportunities, but it will come at a long-term cost as those factories dump chemicals into local areas. Now that the EPA is being gutted, I can see that happening.

Nope, Nope, Nope.

See: 1970's, burning rivers, toxic smog, many "Superfund sites" that STILL haven't been cleaned up.

http://americandecadesboyle.wikispaces.com/Environmentalism+...

Not sure if fracking is an environmental issue, but a study says it is.

http://www.newsweek.com/fracking-wells-tainting-drinking-wat...

Being highly educated does not matter if you can't get a job. Also, a balanced economy shouldn't require everyone to be highly educated.

What a willful misunderstanding of the other position.

If someone said to you, while commiserating over some kind of economic hardship you were experiencing, that you ought to move into their town or even live on their street, would that seem to you equivalent to their saying that they "honestly don't care about" you?

Ok, but, if you take away the wealth redistribution, rural Americans' taxes go up and they have even less income. It's even harder to pay for school or move to the city for work. Or just to put food on the table.

> It's lack of opportunity. What is your answer to that?

Move where the jobs are? It sucks to move away from home, but it's not like every city-dweller is born in the city where they work. Plenty of people move to other cities for work.

NH is within spitting distance of plenty of great schools.

> Trump literally said I will fight to get you jobs back. ... He was the only candidate that actually said a single idea that was directly aimed at helping them

If you think Trump was the only candidate promising to create jobs, you're simply weren't listening to the debates or other campaign messaging: http://www.ontheissues.org/2016/Hillary_Clinton_Jobs.htm

PS. I am 100% not a Trump supporter. See how this devolves into assuming I'm a Trump supporter? I'm just stating things based on what they said. I never even attacked Hilary and her claims.

all trump has talked about is how jobs are fleeing america. he even criticized ford for moving jobs from michigan when in fact they weren't.

so please, if you're going to say trump brought up jobs, at least address the fact that he didn't offer any solutions then, nor has he offered any now. that Carrier "job save" of 1000 was due to the state of indiana offering them incentives to keep the jobs here. that's not a very sustainable idea (also, although i'm not necessarily opposed to states giving companies incentives like this at tax-payer expense, that move seems very anti-free market all things considered).

This is very, very obviously not what rural Americans want to hear.

Promising jobs is not new.

edit: correct acronym.

Trump, had and has not come up with a concrete plan as I recall. His current plan seems to be to... I don't know actually.

Just opposing the TPP doesn't make a case for trump winning votes and the presidency.

Trump had other actual statements, like "i will not let ford shut this plant down, and send jobs to Mexico!"

Let's not forget: "we'll start hitting those people where it hurts the most!" Those people being immigrants and China, who were "taking all the jobs."

hillary believed that most people would be rational and not vote for someone that obviously against what America stood for. He has had more scandal in his run for office than I've seen in many imaginative tv shows.

It seems, when it came down to it, people chose to vote for their party. Even if whatever trump said or did, was against what they held as the standard for a president.

[0]http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-clinton-idUSK...

edit - Include link

Unless we find some way for rural areas to be reinvigorated though government-funded infrastructure building and private arbitrage as we have in times past, we're going to have to let nature run its course. This kind of outcome has happened time and again in the past, to cultures now long since dead. Rural America doesn't like that, and of course neither does MSA America, since it means the underdog doesn't win. So give a figure. How much does cost of living as a percentage of income need to be before we as a society can stage an intervention to say "No, we can no longer support your way of life. It's become too expensive. You need to figure out how to be productive or your seat at the table is no longer open."?

Rural America is a happy unintended outcome of previous laws, policies, and such that has become prohibitively expensive with a low ROI. Questioning whether help should be given in the form of subsistence handouts or expensive infrastructure shifts isn't taboo--it's at the heart of demand from Rural America. "Bring Jobs Back!" How? Government has two methods: coerce jobs to be opened there (fascism or socialism, which most Rural Americans claim to be against) or to design policy to encourage growth (no guarantee jobs will come back, especially the old jobs people are trained for). We must ask ourselves the question whether we want collectivism or similar types of job-making programs, shown to be fairly fragile depending on who is in charge, or whether we want to move forward with the techno-liberal/libertarian march that has been ongoing since the Industrial Revolution.

If saving Rural America is a zero-sum outcome with the long-run survival of the species through colonizing the solar system and beyond, which do we invest in as a society?

As a last point, isn't leaving Rural America to it's own devices to figure things out what Rural America has been voting for since Nixon, anyhow?

That is because of economies of scale. It is not possible to get a U.C. Berkeley in every one of the 17,000 towns the US has. Not even big cities will be getting U.C. Berkeley. Aside from NYC and Boston and Pittsburgh, there isn't any other city that has a comparable Top-5 engineering school.

Same for Tesla factories, you cant have a factory in every one of the 17,000 towns.

I'm not sure how Trump is helping these towns, but the Dems did offer solutions, more fundamental solutions. Like better access to education so new graduates could qualify for better jobs. These problems have been created over a generation and wont be solved with a simple travel ban or what not, they will be solved with education and empowerment.

Secondly, Dems have tried hard to get a better health-care system. Being an entrepreneur I understand how critical this is -- without healthcare I would not take risks, not with a family. I'd stick to my job to just get health benefits. Having a portable health plan is also critical to allowing people mobility, hopefully upward mobility.

I'm not talking health care. And I 100% know that it is not reasonable to bring those schools to rural America. But where is the dialog around helping them? At least a conversation around fixing the heroin problem and finding them jobs. If you have that conversation that was brought up during the election in big debates during the election, please link it.

there are countless examples of Trump at least putting together a plan, even if its stupid, to help them.

w/r/t the Heroin problem, for a generation, Republicans have pushed an agenda of criminalizing drug addiction, labeling it a moral issue and throwing victims into prison. That worked to their agenda when it was a big urban problem affecting swaths of minorities. As a bonus, it also ups private for-profit prison populations, another Republican agenda. Now that it is a rural scourge amongst white Americans, Republicans are having a difficult time reconciling their previous lack of empathy, so they are mostly silent.

I'm a "city-dweller" and while I'm registered Republican I generally vote Democratic. My taxes go up as a 1%-er, but i'm 100% to have my taxes go up to support my fellow Americans.

Don't forget that Dems were also strongly for this platform in the 90s under Clinton.

"Both sides are the same" is a rallying cry of people who know that one side is actually much worse.

Creating jobs in where they don't geographically make sense isn't helping, it's passing the buck.

Is this a joke?

The discussion around how to humanely deal with drug addiction has been completely shut down by the right wing. they have made it a literal WAR against drug users.

Rural america dug its grave by pushing for the drug war for decades, and now that white americans are having a drug problem its finally time to step back and look at this issue more seriously?

And you think its the cities that lack empathy? How disconnected from reality can you be?

OTOH, I know a few founders who have tried to start relocation financing companies, and it just doesn't seem to work. Too much risk on the loans, and not enough demand from the people who would be helped most by them.

When I moved to Austin, I had plenty of people warn me I would get mugged every time I set foot on the street. Similar outrageous claims have been made regarding every place I've ended up. Nuts to that. We can't let fear rule our lives.

Yes. But that's one thing that does keep rural (or even, in my experience, suburban) people from moving to large cities. They really can't imagine paying so much for rent.

Some in my family can't even imagine renting an apartment. It's a house or nothing. A cheap-ish house in a rural area seems to win out over a better job in a city, more often than not.

For most people here, $500 is crazy. People in rural America tend to be poor.

People can stock away $50/month, $30/month, you name it. Low amounts. It adds up quick. And even then, you can get 4 or 5 people in an area who want to move to the city to go, and go. Or a person can join the military to get out, in most cases.

Maybe because its late at night, but I feel like I'm coming across unsympathetic. I'm not--I know it's hard to leave. It's not as easy as up and leaving one day. What concerns me is the idea of an apparent lack of desire to put into action the wistfulness of wanting to leave by grandparent comment and other comments in this thread. Rural America is caught in a spiral of increasing costs that it can't dig itself out of. Most everyone knows that. Is it kinder to continue giving sustenance living to people wanting to stay or to open the valve for transferring to cities through housing projects?

Years where nothing has gone wrong that needs to deplete that relocation fund.

It's a nice dream, but it seems like a dream to me. (Also grew up poor, though not as poor as a lot of people.)

Once you've found that initial $50, you'll find more margins. Maybe it comes by switching over to lentils, eggs, salt, and multivitamins. Maybe it comes from canceling cable. Maybe it comes by cutting out the internet for awhile while you put the money to better use. Maybe it comes by picking up an early morning newspaper route in the wealthier part of town. Maybe it comes by working at the local Walmart distributor 25 miles away. Maybe it comes by selling the wood on your property, should you have some. The point is that margins for super-saving and liquidation are possible.

Tell me more about disposable income... whats it like?

I lived two years among the poorest of the poor in the Philippines, who live on less then $2/day, and I've seen super saving as a necessity for survival. In the US we have wonderful things like food stamps, guaranteed healthcare at ERs, utilities help if you're poor, etc. that take so much of the risk out of life. If you're living on rice + salt + parasite-laden water, cooking your food in a stolen pot by burning coconut shells from your manual labor during the day as a copras harvester (and getting your protein from unripe jackfruit, salted minnows, purloined coconut, and the wild bird that falls into your traps), living in a house that has a thatched roof and split bamboo walls and floors, and you still send your kids to school and pay the $100/year in tuition to get them there, then seeing how to save literally any disposable income makes a whole lot of sense. We're so wealthy in the US that we have little idea what it means to be truly poor.

Adam Smith, coined the father of economics, had this to say about this sentiment in The Wealth of Nations:

> By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England. The poorest creditable person of either sex would be ashamed to appear in public without them. In Scotland, custom has rendered them a necessary of life to the lowest order of men; but not to the same order of women, who may, without any discredit, walk about barefooted. In France they are necessaries neither to men nor to women, the lowest rank of both sexes appearing there publicly, without any discredit, sometimes in wooden shoes, and sometimes barefooted. Under necessaries, therefore, I comprehend not only those things which nature, but those things which the established rules of decency have rendered necessary to the lowest rank of people. All other things I call luxuries, without meaning by this appellation to throw the smallest degree of reproach upon the temperate use of them. Beer and ale, for example, in Great Britain, and wine, even in the wine countries, I call luxuries. A man of any rank may, without any reproach, abstain totally from tasting such liquors. Nature does not render them necessary for the support of life, and custom nowhere renders it indecent to live without them.

When I graduated college, I had a decent job in financial software, but figured I would measure my standard of living against my peers who were unemployed or going to grad school and just bank the rest of my salary. That gave me the freedom to take advantage of many opportunities that would've been closed off to me had I measured my standard of living against what other people in my workplace expected.

Similarly, when looking at my life as a whole, I compare it to my dad (who grew up in WW2 Philippines and had his house bombed) and think I'm doing great.

Sure, I understand that it's natural to compare yourself against your immediate surroundings rather than arbitrary points in time and space. But if a mental model comparing yourself against another reference point will make you happier and give you the wherewithal to actually improve your standard of living, why not adopt it?

Sometimes you bite the bullet for awhile, as an investment for the future. You do what it takes.

They had the $500, they just chose to spend it on the latest iPhone.

That's not what loeg wrote. There are other ways of spending money, such as infrastructure projects - when I visited Oregon, I noticed how much of the infrastructure was from New Deal projects, which, of course, is the epitome of everything that fiscal conservatives are fighting against. If you are opposed things like that, and you don't have an alternative solution to offer, get off your high horse about other peoples' lack of empathy.

They may be voting against their financial interest. Maybe Trump is a facist. But I'll be damned if telling someone they are an idiot ever got them to join a cause. Where's the empathy there?

So what are we on the left doing? We're playing to our own base. If we really cared about the people in rural America we would soften the rhetoric and try to make some converts for the benefit of everyone. But we appear to enjoy being right so much, that we would rather lose elections than get off our high horses for a while to converse with our fellow citizens.

Which is funny, since the jobs left when the employers in these small towns betrayed them and abandoned them for overseas labor and robots.

No, it's not; income limits are set by states, vary by population, and for populations that are covered at all tend to be much greater than $20/mo. The Medicaid expansion as part of the ACA also resultted in substantial changes in many states.

[0] state limits, as a percent of the Federal Poverty Level, are available here: https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/program-information/medica...

I'm questioning whether entitlements really help rebuild that solid ground for rural Americans in economic hardships.

However, until scarcity is totally eliminated, we'll be faced with the same challenge over and over again - how to bring prosperity to those whose roles in the social and economic order have been eliminated.

I have no good answers.

Moving to where there is economic activity is what many rural Americans need; identifying the fruitful places for that for one's individual circumstances and executing the moves, however, is harder to do when you can't meet subsistence needs, and sometimes people are going to need retraining to have new opportunities, or simply be past the point of having new opportunities, requiring additional individual support.

it is an attempt to provide them with funding for better schools, better healthcare, better access to training. hell, better funding for roads or technology so children who are not near major cities don't have to drive far to get access to education.

i have been the beneficiary of "wealth redistribution" and what happened? i grew up, got a job that pays well, and have contributed back to society and economy (with at the very least, tax dollars). there have been studies that show that providing funding for education or into the sciences gives back a large positive ROI.

yet one side continues to advocate for cutting education, healthcare, nasa, neah... all in the name of giving back to the top 1% of the most wealthy.

I mean, if this is about self-empowerment, saying you need a factory to move in to start doing anything is about as far from being self-empowered as setting up a UBI.

Being given UBI, you don't get any fulfillment from work or a feeling of contributing back to society.

If you bring in jobs, even just government jobs, people get a feeling of contributing because they work to produce something or provide a service and they pay taxes.

>If they want jobs so badly, why aren't they making them?

This is as stupid as saying, why don't poor people stop being poor by getting money? Good paying jobs take big investments that nobody cares to make. Look at orgs like Y combinator and other VCs. They will rarely even hear a pitch from someone not living in the bay area.

Grow up, rural folks. Figure this shit out for yourselves, if you want to be so self-reliant.

Even in rural America, there are liberals.

There are legitimate reasons to object to redistribution schemes via the federal government. Framing those objections as lack of empathy and furthermore suggesting that this reluctance is the primary reason these problems aren't solved is an unfair and simplistic view of these sorts of complex problems.

There is also lots of evidence that conservative/right-wing/republicans give way more to charity than progressive/left-wing/democrats (e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/opinion/21kristof.html). So I'm not sure the 'lack of empathy' theory holds water.

As for legitimate reasons to be wary of federal wealth distribution mechanisms:

  * private charitable activities can be more effective
  * administrative overhead associated with a federal bureaucracy
  * federal misunderstandings of state/local concerns and conditions
  * federal one-size-fits-all solutions
  * lack of controls to prevent fraudulent receipt of benefits
  * there is often an assumption of zero-sum thinking, sometimes the analysis ends there as if lack of wealth was *the* problem
  * no actual plan for how to use the money effectively or any attempt to measure progress