The Socialism of Poverty - part the second

If there be any left who doubt that the Empty State folks, who complain that they've been left behind by the rest of us, have made their own ingrate bed, well Eduardo Porter has gathered up much investigation by academics, researchers, and bureaucrats (who provide the socialism to the ingrates). You should read it.

For starters, this is the title in my dead trees version I read this morning: "The Government Check Disconnect". Not too pointed, I think you'd agree. Here, on the other hand, is the title as I just pulled up for the innterTubes version: "Where Government Is a Dirty Word, but Its Checks Pay the Bills". Now, that's a title I can applaud. Ingrates in other words. Note that it is customary in the news biz for byline folk not to write the headline; editorial normally does that. The subject of the article: Kentucky.

"The SNAP card works every month; the kids eat two meals a day, but people don't think about where the food comes from and go vote for Republicans," said Larry King, a Kentucky farmer who is chairman of the Democratic Party in McCreary County, whose residents get 55 percent of their income from federal transfers.

As said here more times than not, they've continued to elect Right Wingnut politicians who revel in grinding them under the boot. But these knuckleheads blame DC Democrats, who've been the only ones attempting to bring them out of their self-inflicted Dark Age. Can't let them wimins and faggots tell them what to do!!! No sirreee!!

Harlan has few answers to its economic tribulations: few roads linking it to the world's markets, few good broadband links, few college graduates, few investors willing to risk their money there. "Most of the kids from here who have a chance to go to university never come back," said Colby Kirk, executive director at One Harlan County, a nonprofit economic development group serving the area.

As stated more than once: you're not going to turn a 55 year old unemployed, uneducated, miner/factory worker/whatever into a 56 year old financial analyst. Either support them directly and humanely, or let them die out naturally. The Right Wingnuts have been on a tirade toward the latter. The rest of us seek some sort of former. I don't have the answer, yet. But knuckleheads have to admit the base truth: they've been electing their overseers for generations, and have to stop doing that. If they don't, nothing will change.

Here is the end of the article, and where Porter manages to go off the rails:

As small towns lag behind prosperous urban centers along the coasts, as rural communities shed businesses and jobs, and as their residents turn to welfare as a last line of sustenance, the more they will resent Washington's inability, or unwillingness, to stem the decline.
[my emphasis]

It's absolutely not Washington to blame. Washington didn't make natural gas cleaner and cheaper than coal. Washington didn't tell Kentucky, or any state, to denigrate education. Most of the difference between coastal, urban development and the dearth of same in the Empty States is that the coastal states' citizens chose to invest in their kids and society. There's a reason that the best schools, public and private, exist in coastal cities. We decided, generations ago, that it mattered. It was, and remains, true that the progressive coastal states have been sending moolah by the boxcar load to the Empty States, by way of Washington. Don't now blame us because the Empty State folks, over those self same generations, didn't give a damn.