The Socialism of Poverty

It gets clearer and clearer that the NYT folks are reading these missives. Not that they'll admit it, naturally. A frequent theme over the last year or so is that the Red State vs. Blue State meme is bogus; and always has been. The political, social, and economic divide is betwixt shitkickers and city dwellers. The divide goes back to the beginning of the Country. Just look at the abominations in the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights; accommodation of Southern (rural) demands. The following stories from the last few days add more testimony from 'experts'. What none of the experts and reporters have the balls to say is that the shitkickers are poor, uneducated, sick, and hopeless because they've always elected fascist politicians to run their local and state governments. Yet, it's also a fact that Washington, particularly under Democratic administrations, has been shifting moolah from Blue States to Red States since at least FDR. The damn Farm Bill alone runs to $20,000,000,000 each and every year. It's proper to yell at them, "you've made your bed now sleep in it. Get out of my face!!" If only we could get rid of the Electoral College which cemented the shitkicker bias in the presidency.

So, let's look at the articles.

First, "Chase for Talent Pushes Tech Giants Far Beyond West Coast". Here's the money quote

Driven by a limited pool of skilled workers and the ballooning cost of living in their home bases of Silicon Valley and Seattle, as well as President Trump's shifting immigration policies, the companies are aggressively taking their talent hunt across the United States and elsewhere. And they are coalescing particularly around a handful of urban areas that are already winners in the new knowledge-based economy, including New York City, Washington, Boston and Austin, Tex.

Austin, it need be noted, is about as Blue as can be (Austin is in Travis County; can't find just Austin numbers, but here's a zoomable precinct map without clear city boundaries you can play with.)

Second, an earlier piece

Tech companies feed on highly educated and specialized workers, specifically dense clusters of them where workers and companies interacting with one another are more likely to produce new ideas. Washington and New York, as it turns out, are two of the most highly educated regions in the country, with already large pools of tech workers.

Third, a rural saga "For Manufacturers, a Complex Mix Can Determine Location"

But the rural labor force is not necessarily less expensive.

Bob Hess, a vice chairman of Newmark Knight Frank, the global real estate company, explained that labor costs were no longer significantly lower in rural parts of the country.

Fourth, another Eduardo Porter piece, "The Hard Truths of Trying to 'Save' the Rural Economy". A few quotes get Mr. Porter.

One thing seems clear to me: nobody — not experts or policymakers or people in these communities — seems to know quite how to pick rural America up.

Well, may be. Or may be not. Just a few graphs later he says,

In a report published in November, Mark Muro, William Galston and Clara Hendrickson of the Brookings Institution laid out a portfolio of ideas to rescue the substantial swath of the country that they identify as "left behind." They identify critical shortages bedeviling declining communities: workers with digital skills, broadband connections, capital. And they have plans to address them: I.T. training and education initiatives, regulatory changes to boost lending to small businesses, incentives to invest in broadband.
[that snippet is somewhat different from the text in my dead trees version. hmmm?]

One need only note that Right Wingnut Red States (mostly) have passed laws prohibiting communities from establishing "socialist" innterTubes services.

Naturally, capitalization of agriculture is what caused the rural flight of the no longer employed farm hands to Northern factories. These days,

There are, to be sure, some rural communities with productivity as high as some big cities. But they rely on heavily mechanized and automated industries that support few jobs: oil extraction or large-scale agriculture, in which tractors talk to satellites and no drivers are involved. The livestock business on the vast pastures of Sioux County, Neb., for example, supports an economy worth $306,000 per worker, according to data from Mr. Muro and Jacob Whiton of Brookings. But only 1,200 people live there.

So, we, this country, have two choices: either let the shitkickers die off in their bitterness and stupidity at what they did to themselves, or implement a program even more generous than what FDR did for them in the 30s or more than the current flood of money from the Blue States. All for a bunch of uneducated ingrates. What a country!