Take those ideas a few steps further and see if they still sound reasonable. Start with you live in a trailer or small home with your family (parents, uncles, aunts, brothers) in a small town that died 30 years ago, and you live on whatever assistance the state gives. Also, you may share an unreliable car between everybody, you might not even have that.

That's probably a pretty decent scenario. Add a few drug addictions and a police record for drugs, and it gets significantly worse. Add a long term medical ailment. Add the inability to get any credit. Add some relatively massive debt. I don't want this to sound like it does, but I don't think you understand the reality of the situation that affects the vast majority of US land mass.

Nobody said anything about coal, except Trump. Coal is economically dead, even the coal miner's know that. It's that since coal is gone, there is nothing else to turn to. It's all the other jobs and factories that have long since gone.