Schools are disappearing because there is no tax base to support them, and the remaining residents tend to favor an austere government. There's also a degree of distrust of governmental organizations. There are a lot of small towns where, if the state government came in and said "We're going to build you a school for free and you won't have to pay for anything" there would be a lot of belly-aching about how the bus traffic would increase wear-and-tear on roads, causing more roadwork, raising taxes.
My father lives in rural Wisconsin. Every political season, there's a wave of people running for office trying to reduce the county's tax burden from the 2nd smallest to the 1st smallest in the state, by basically completely gutting what already meager community amenities are provided. Each year they get closer to sweeping the county elections.
Then 25 years from now, those kids will find the asterisk from the state where they find themselves liable for all the maintenance on the huge complex they couldn't afford in the first place when the ceiling is leaking and there are cracks growing in the gymnasium's walls.
Hard to imagine why they don't have much affection for the programs provided by taxation. Admittedly, it's petty to take those grievances out on the local government, which probably provides the only public services they like. But when all you hear about is federal and state foolishness, and all you can affect is your own town, the misplaced anger isn't that surprising.
Rural folk don't want help from your "our" because their situation is different than yours. What works for major metropolitan areas doesn't work for small or rural schools. In an area where likely career paths involve working on or inheriting the family farm or ranch, more urban-centric curricula don't make sense.
It's not that rural people in the US are more insular, it's that they need to be more independent. For instance, when the nearest ambulance may be an hour away, you learn to deal with emergency medical issues yourself, or you or your loved one die. When that ambulance cannot get to your house when the husband is having a heart attack, the wife somehow manages to get her husband into a vehicle to meet the ambulance somewhere the ambulance can reach. When the nearest sheriff is likewise an hour away when you call for help, if you even have 911, the sheriff is likely going to assume you have a shotgun, tell you to get it out, load it, and use it, if necessary.
It's not that rural people in the US are insular or unaware of the rest of the US, it's that their situations are entirely different from what city dwellers encounter. Ambulances, police and fire response aren't just a few minutes away. It can be hours before emergency services arrive.
And likewise, getting to even your local school that graduates at a HS level can take an hour or more. Getting to a college or university likely will take even longer.
edit: grammar, spelling, minor bit of clarity.
People on the left simply don't understand the difference of living on your own. The independence is completely at a different level. You may very well need a gun to fend off some crazy banging at your door that won't go away. In the city, you have the assumption that the cops will swoop in when you call 911 (albeit a very mistaken assumption).
There is a lot of pundit handwaving going on right now saying that it's all just money that keeps gun laws from being passed, but people forget where the NRA gets its money. It's from individuals (and for the PAC, they don't even allow corporate donations).
There are lots of people that truly see any gun laws as government overreach from a bunch of politicians who are usually flanked on both sides with gun toting body guards.
Well, sorry for that tangent.
Fundamentally the problem is that gun ownership is a core American ideal (to enough electorally well placed people), so outright bans are infeasible and other restrictions cause a race by manufacturers to innovate around the restrictions.
You might mean "assault weapon," but that's a poorly-defined political term that can include cosmetic attachments and colors.
And plenty of people get AR-15s for home defense.
It's also irrelevant. Home protection isn't the only reason you'd have a gun in a rural setting. They're also quite excellent for keeping groundhogs and coyotes off of one's property, and for recreational purposes.
This mindset of people who know nothing about guns (e.g. not knowing what an assault rifle is) claiming "You should only be allowed to have what I think you need" is the exact problem at the heart of this discussion.
So what you are saying is that banning the AR-15 shouldn't be problematic for people, because they can simply become familiar with other options like shotguns, making them the best gun for them?
> It's also irrelevant. Home protection isn't the only reason you'd have a gun in a rural setting. They're also quite excellent for keeping groundhogs and coyotes off of one's property, and for recreational purposes.
> This mindset of people who know nothing about guns (e.g. not knowing what an assault rifle is) claiming "You should only be allowed to have what I think you need" is the exact problem at the heart of this discussion.
I think the exact problem is not "you should only be allowed to have what I think you need". Every regulation and law in existence is a variation of "you should only be allowed to do X to the extent I think you need". A speed limit is functionally equivalent to the statement "you should only be allowed to drive as fast as I think you need". They are all attempts at balancing utility (how fast you can drive) and costs for yourself and those around you (getting in a crash).
The actual problem is the mindset of people like yourself claiming the utility of weapons like the AR-15 for tasks like groundhog control and recreation outweighs the costs of AR-15s being used to take human lives.
Why stop there? They can learn Jiu Jitsu and not need the shotgun! All things are possible when we are just speculating about how to take others' rights in theoretical scenarios we won't have to deal with ourselves.
The AR-15 is a fun gun to shoot, which is why it is popular.
> I think the exact problem is not "you should only be allowed to have what I think you need". Every regulation and law in existence is a variation of "you should only be allowed to do X to the extent I think you need". A speed limit is functionally equivalent to the statement "you should only be allowed to drive as fast as I think you need". They are all attempts at balancing utility (how fast you can drive) and costs for yourself and those around you (getting in a crash).
Speed limits are something we all understand culturally, and are not set at the federal level.
If huge swaths of the country had no cars or roads, they might clamor for federally lower speed limits every time there was a bus accident. "The actual problem is the mindset of people like yourself claiming that going 10 MPH faster outweighs the real loss of human lives." And that's basically what happens with guns any time there is a mass shooting.
> The actual problem is the mindset of people like yourself claiming the utility of weapons like the AR-15 for tasks like groundhog control and recreation outweighs the costs of AR-15s being used to take human lives.
The second amendment's purpose is for the gun's use for the purpose of taking lives. Nobody's arguing groundhog control is the only valid use case for having a weapon. Valid use cases include as a check against government tyranny (as protected by the second amendment), home defense, as well as the other reasons I mentioned.
And if you're going to complain about the AR-15, you have to state where you draw the line. Presumably a ban of AR-15s alone wouldn't accomplish your goals. What guns and gun features are you proposing banning?
You know what the difference is between an AR15 and your typical .30-06 hunting rifle? Beside the fact that the 30-06 will do more damage, it is usually brown wood instead of black. That is why people are scared of the AR15, it's black. You can throw a big clip on any semi-automatic hunting rifle and it will be just as deadly.
You're right that "semi-automatic" deserves more focus than "black".
I do wonder how likely it is that the "typical" hunting rifle is actually bolt action though.
Last April in Oklahoma, a home defense situation with an AR-15 made the news. There were 3 armed intruders that got killed with only 2 rifle shots. That is a great example of just how effective the AR-15 can be in home defense.
Also, assuming kids are going to be working on "the family farm or ranch" is ignoring the past 50 years agricultural consolidation in America. The economic landscape of the rural midwest has changed a lot in just my lifetime.
It seems like someone is always talking about bonds and matching funds from the state to build some monstrosity at the edge of town so it's only reachable by bus.
The problems of the school are many, but facility is not very high up on the list. The lack of smartboards, likewise. All the best teachers/professors I ever had used whiteboards or blackboards, and plenty of them held classes in buildings 3 times as old as my high school, with trashcans in the hallway to catch the rainwater. That's not to say there's not a place for new things in education, but thoughtful use of it doesn't require brand new everything.
An interesting theory, but many of the top universities in the world are state universities: Berkeley, UCLA, U. of Michigan, U. of Washington, and (if Wikipedia is accurate and I understand it correctly) ETH-Zurich, University College London and University of Toronto are all top 25 global universities.[0] I'm omitting Imperial College London and LSE because I don't know their status.
[0] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...
They incorporated as a town to save their way of life as an unincorporated community then got greedy and tried to to town things without a town budget.
people aren't created out of a vacuum and randomly choose a place to live. What if your 70 year old mother is simply too frail to move to a city? What if you desperately need the monthly paycheck and cannot just go months without pay looking for a job because you care for your child? What if you simply do not want your community to rot away because every abled bodied person runs off to the city?
People aren't just amoeba in a lab experiment.
"too frail" to move doesn't make sense - not having enough money does make sense. Look for a job while you have your current one - it is far easier and more successful that way anyway. Country living with a decent lifestyle is for those that have figured out a way to afford it, not for anyone that feels like it.
There are options: just because it isn't what you dream of doing doesn't mean it isn't an option.
There was an interesting thread on reddit about coal towns in (I think) Virginia, and the mindset of people there and the situation they were in. It was stated that there was a large pool of money in the state available to people for retraining (coal to trucking or solar development, etc) and something like less than 25% of the money was even used.
A woman I know got a simple laser cutter and designed a site around doing craft projects with it. In under a year she has thousands of followers and is making thousands a month doing it. I mean, hell, just get you and your friends together and say, "ok, we need to get out of here, lets all live together as cheaply as possible, until we have enough money, then rent some place in a better location, and live there, pooling resources, until we all get better jobs."
There are options, now more than ever with the Internet existing and the mind numbing amount of resources it brings.
Those who are born and raised in rural areas can't just uproot their lives the moment they turn 18 and start to afford, or even enjoy city life.
Because the commute is closer? It's still at least as slow in many places, because of traffic problems generated by tighter clusters of people.
The idea that cities are the most optimal is an idea, not a proven fact. Your experience may support the idea, but mine certainly does not.
The point here is that there are more people living in cities than in rural areas, simply because that has been true for a few generations, and people don't tend to change lifestyles.
People who grow up with one lifestyle realize the advantages it provides, and grow up with a bias toward that lifestyle. That bias coupled with the population difference is the real reason the majority of people don't care about rural areas. Personally, I think we should fight that bias.
Rural areas typically don't modify the local drainage (you're not likely connected to a sewer, you have a septic system). They don't become heat islands are there's relatively little pave or concreted. The noxious gasses aren't usually a problem due to lower traffic, usage and density, except in some mountain valleys where you get temperature inversions over winter that trap some of that.
The problems are technological/economical. Getting power is a pain in the ass, yet we've mostly solved that, likewise with traditional phone land-lines. Internet access is abysmal. I get better internet connectivity on my cell phone than my parents can get in their house because local providers won't run cable/fiber because it's too expensive for too few subscribers, but the federal government mandated access to both power & phone and we have those.
I think you've bought a bill of goods that a certain group of people are selling, without actually having lived it.
I think this is an almost uniquely American phenomenon. In most places in the world, the suburbs are where you grudgingly live when you can't afford housing in the city.
Anyway I was just offering a basic justification for why society would focus on improving lives in cities as opposed to rural areas.
You're assuming a centralized distribution model and that the overhead of centralization is more than made up for with economics of scale.
edit: is that not the implied assumption?
Sure, I suppose it is.. do you mean to suggest that the assumption is false?
Yes. Society should always be doing more than what is cost optimal.
Cities are only being focused on right now naturally because that's where the rich people are. It wasn't that long ago that inner cities were quite poor and there were people making excuses like you for not investing in them.
If it's the 90% figure you doubt, I encourage you to look into some road projects. In Virginia, we have a particularly problematic system where the local contribution is pegged at 2% (see page 52)(though it can vary by project.) You are welcome to read the VA urban (misnomer) maintenance code, though I encourage you to find the one applicable to you, so you can be familiar with the perverse incentives provided in your own area. [http://www.virginiadot.org/business/resources/local_assistan...]
Reality is that more people now live in urban areas[1]. Democracy being what it is, most funding goes to the majority - which are in the city. Add to that that setting up this infrastructure is often not cost effective for a private business (due to a lack of customers) and that most rural communities prefer less government intervention (ie less taxes), we have a situation where there is little impetus to invest in rural communities by private companies and governments (at least local) don't have funding to pay for service.
[1] https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2016/comm/acs-...
Democracy has to be more than two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner.
It's true that the majority can just vote to line their own pockets and leave the minority in squalor, but that leaves a pretty shitty country leftover. Many of these rural areas look like third-world countries and that's not something us urbanites should be proud of.
Scholarship money disproportionately goes to lower income students, but that doesn't mean we should stop giving them scholarship money.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_S...
Strange that you'd say that, from a population historical of voting for anti-tax candidates. Perhaps not you personally.
In other words, you'd like to socialize the downsides of living in remote areas of the country?
No, its city folks voting all the money to their schools. Its democracy, but its not pretty.
> even for the same size school (the same tax base approximately) This is probably a bad assumption. Rural folks pay significantly lower per capita taxes, on average.
Here are a few relevant sources, but this information is all over the place: https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/817088161906102273 http://www.startribune.com/metro-vs-outstate-which-counties-... https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/03/opinion/sunday/why-blue-s...
Some states still have notable funding issues between districts, though. This gives a pretty good description of the issue: https://www.npr.org/2016/04/18/474256366/why-americas-school...
"Strange that you'd say that..."
They didn't.
EDIT: Deleted sarcasm. Also adding: I say all this even though I actually lean the same way in my suspicion that rural dwellers probably absorb proportionally more public spending in some categories, while voting against "big government" etc.
Yes.
>Strange that you'd say that, from a population historical of voting for anti-tax candidates.
They're stuck in a two-party system where one side looks down their nose at rural voters and their values and the other sides looks just down their nose at rural voters.
>In other words, you'd like to socialize the downsides of living in remote areas of the country?
The wording here makes it seem like what's happening in rural areas is just a consequence of nature but it's not, it's tied in with all sorts of policy decisions we've made over decades, making new policy decisions to fix that seems reasonable to me. Here's a really great article on the issue: https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and...
Literally all of those services are more efficient in cities. A km of fiber serves more household when population is dense. Ambulance (and any other vehicle) commute times are shorter when everyone's in the same place. A single school building can be within walking distance of more kids.
Its not a matter of city folk being entitled or holding their provincial counterparts in contempt. It is impossible for rural areas to enjoy the same standard of living as urbanities because literally every interaction and service has to pay extra to solve the last mile problem.
Do you know how much fiber, how many ambulances, how many school buildings it would take to make every rural area as desirable as the city?
If they want the market to provide, they should move closer to the markets.
Where? I live in an very remote part of Northern Minnesota. Even so, worst case ambulance time to most people in my area would be 15-20 mins.
I would argue that an incredibly small portion of the US population lives >1hr from an ambulance or first responder.
http://www.flexmonitoring.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/CAH...
It doesn't show larger hospitals, so it is hard to directly answer the question about access to emergency care, but it shows that there is quite wide geographic coverage. The map in this article shows that the gaps are just where you would expect, in the extraordinarily rural west:
https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/03/health/hospital-deserts/index...
And that’s a medically meaningful difference. 20m response time, 45m to the hospital, you’re still in the time window for critical therapies for heart attacks and strokes. Several hours response time, you’re not. I mean to say, I’m not nitpicking: the difference between your scenario and what the previous poster asserts is large and medically meaningful.
The town I grew up in is 45-60m to an ER during the day, 30m at night. It’s a volunteer squad, so typical response time is ~20m, longer during the weekday. If someone else has an emergency, they will likely need a mutual aid call, which adds 15-30m. If you need ALS, the ambulance may need to pull over en route when a county paramedic responds. If you are further out, the times increase rapidly. Many common emergencies like stroke are guaranteed fatal.
In the small city that I live in, first responder for a medical emergency will arrive in <7m. Transport to hospital is ~5-10m.
It’s a different world than the coastal cities. (Much like you said, but that’s the route, anyway)
Sacramento itself is a kind of borderland, despite being the capitol.
I can't speak for school funding, but are you actually suggesting ambulance response times were better in those areas in the past? Or broadband?
The first claim seems unlikely, unless that’s 30 minutes at the speed of sound. I’d need solid citations to bite. The second seems unlikely as well, and given how bad response times can be in disadvantaged parts of cities, I’d wonder if it’s an urban/rural divide, or the usual rich/poor divide.
The third point is absolutely true, and that’s what happens when people leave, and therefore aren’t paying property taxes in that area. A supermajority of Americans live in and around cities, so that’s no shock.
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/27/us/nearly-half-in-the-us-a...
More recent: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_S...
80% of Americans live in cities, so is it really a shock that a majority of resources are focused on the majority of people?
It doesn't have to be a physical or technical limitation at all. It's a limitation of the cable monopolies not seeing profit in putting fiber or cable lines out there and there's no competition so if they don't, no one will.
As for everything else you've said... I would like to introduce you to the concept of the tyranny of the majority. If the richest country in the world says to its citizens "sorry your school isn't big enough to afford books, have fun in the job market" something is seriously fucked up.
Yes, yes it is a shock that rural populations are treated like shit. I grew up in it, and the fact that it's getting worse not better is still shocking every single day.
In other words rural TX and AZ are atypical.