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?
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."?