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I would love to see the data, but from the data I have seen, the data conflict with the popular (populist) narrative. A lot of people in America seem to believe

I would love to see the data, but from the data I have seen, the data conflict with the popular (populist) narrative. A lot of people in America seem to believe that the hardworking "real Americans" in the middle of the country are subsidizing the poorly-run coastal liberal enclaves. In reality, the money almost always flows in the other direction; taxpayers in cities are subsidizing the rural-dwellers. This has nothing to do with work ethic, it's just a hard fact that a lot of costs scale with square miles instead of with people (roads, emergency services), and that lower cost of living in the country leads to lower incomes which lead to lower tax revenue.

UncleOxidant 5y ago
Part of this has to do with how we've been able to drive down agricultural costs by means of automation over the last century which has driven a move away from family farms to larger corporate farms. In 1900, just under 40 percent of the total US population lived on farms, and 60 percent lived in rural areas. Today, the respective figures are only about 1 percent and 20 percent.[1] Sure the coasts are creating more economic output by far, but people need to eat food. Agriculture is always going to be important, but lot less people are involved in it than ever before. This is part of what's led to the urban/rural divide where the rural folks feel left out - there just aren't as many of them as populations have migrated to cities. This is why people in rural areas feel increasingly left out. It's mostly due to economic forces that are out of their control. [1] http://jaysonlusk.com/blog/2016/6/26/the-evolution-of-american-agriculture http://jaysonlusk.com/blog/2016/6/26/the-evolution-of-americ...
- URSpider94 5y ago
  I definitely don't think we should ignore or minimize the contributions of rural Americans. I do think we need to do a better job of making the costs associated with rural life more explicit. This is a big deal in California, where people have pushed further and further into the wilderness, putting themselves at huge risk for wildfires while also increasing the number of miles of power lines that need to be built and maintained; these very power lines are one of the main causes of wildfires.
  - causality0 5y ago
    New power lines are almost never the cause of wildfires. Old, poorly-maintained lines are. For example, the Camp fire that killed 86 people was caused by a hundred year old line that hadn't been serviced in decades. For miles of line around the origin site of the fire the C-hooks looked like this: https://i.imgur.com/r42KsHR.jpg https://i.imgur.com/r42KsHR.jpg
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      Total installed powerline length vs population is a problem. Whether they're new / old or well / poorly serviced is just a difference of a few decades. If there isn't money to service old lines now, then there won't be money to service formerly-new lines in 30 years.
      - causality0 5y ago
        It's not a question of insufficient funds. They spent five billion dollars on shareholder dividends while corporate documents show they were completely aware the equipment was breaking down and posed a wildfire risk, and they broke multiple state regulations to do so.
        d110af5ccf 5y ago
        Some background to add to the above: https://twitter.com/tubetimeus/status/1306366930899460097 https://twitter.com/tubetimeus/status/1306366930899460097 and https://www.buttecounty.net/Portals/30/CFReport/PGE-THE-CAMP-FIRE-PUBLIC-REPORT.pdf https://www.buttecounty.net/Portals/30/CFReport/PGE-THE-CAMP...
        zbrozek 5y ago
        The Camp fire report was riveting after-work reading. The financial engineering to avoid opex and instead magnify capex as a way to bilk the ratepayer is ingenious and evil. Further, their operating procedures and culture seem carefully engineered as a liability dodge. Read the report, it's amazing.
- ghaff 5y ago
  You have to be careful with the 80/20 US Census split numbers between urban/rural. Between myself and a couple neighbors, we're on 100 acres next to even more conservation land. One neighbor has an apple orchard. Another a Christmas tree farm. The town I'm in is considered urban because we're near a major city and adjacent to another small city.
  - philistine 5y ago
    But you are urban. You are near a major city, and adjacent another small one like you said. Urban versus rural is not a measure of closeness to nature, it's a measure of closeness to other humans.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      It depends on your definitions. A lot of people would object to defining urban as encompassing having to drive anywhere except to connect to immediate neighbors. I can basically go to my two immediate neighbors. Otherwise I have to get in a car. Is that urban?
      - thoughtstheseus 5y ago
        Sounds like a suburb. The real inefficient structures.
        briefcomment 5y ago
        In what suburb do you have only two neighbors within walking distance?
        mrcartmenez 5y ago
        Does America have a concept of walking distance?
        ghaff 5y ago
- u801e 5y ago
  This has also happened to manufacturing and coal mining to a certain extent. But, unlike agriculture, the demand for certain resources like coal is significantly less than it used to be, but people in the affected areas haven't been able to find work in other fields.
  - xxpor 5y ago
    Because they're not willing to move.
    - u801e 5y ago
      It takes money to move, and it's unlikely they have the financial resources to handle living in an area with a significantly higher cost of living, unless the job pays very well. Given the fact that public school graduation rates are relatively low where they live, it's unlikely they would be able to secure one of those high paying jobs if they don't have at least a high school diploma or GED.
- threatofrain 5y ago
  But only a slim slice of rural living is on farms, or are you talking about immigrant Latinos who are left out of the political picture? The supermajority of people working American farms and meat shops are Latino immigrants.
- 4cidix 5y ago
  this is nonsense. SALT deductions make it so that the wealthy (including limousine liberals) don't pay taxes
- maxerickson 5y ago
  Farms have gotten bigger, but family farms still dominate. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-structure-and-organization/farm-structure/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-structure-... I guess you can argue that a large closely held company isn't a family farm, but it isn't what "corporate" is meant to conjure up either.
  - relaxing 5y ago
    The majority of production comes from a small minority of farms with > $1MM ARR. Most are still family owned, but I would argue they are “what corporate is meant to conjure up” in the sense of the scale and methods driving the farming operation (just not the legal structure and governance.) That’s why the overall number of farms and farmers has gone down - the little guy can’t make it work economically.
    - maxerickson 5y ago
      But they are the little guys, they just swallowed a few neighbors. People complaining about corporate farming are talking about outside money coming in and taking the land.
thepasswordis 5y ago
Those people in the middle of the country believe that if they all quit their jobs and demanded a government-given wage, that the country would starve to death. If all of the people at facebook, google, and twitter quit their jobs, however, all that would really happen would be that the country would get a bit more peaceful. You're talking about how much is taken in taxes. These people are talking about how much is given in life.
- hackyhacky 5y ago
  Sounds like someone's been watching a bit too much Fox Propaganda. Farms are already subsidized by the government. Imports are already subject to tariffs precisely to protect farmers. Who do you think pays for those subsidies, and who pays for the tariffs? Yeah, the "coastal elites" that you've been trained to hate. In farmers stopped benefiting from the largess of the coast, _they_ would starve to death, and everyone else would have cheaper food.
  - CountDrewku 5y ago
    Just FYI if they starve to death there's no one to plant or harvest the food. Also, if your argument is that the subsidies are unnecessary that would indicate that farming is profitable and they would in fact not starve to death. The point you're trying to make kinda collapsed on itself bud.
    - hackyhacky 5y ago
      Your reading comprehension skills are terrible. 1. In this hypothetical situation, the cheaper food comes from abroad, now that there are no import tariffs. 2. I never said subsidies aren't necessary: I don't know how you can infer that point from what I wrote. I said that subsidies exist to protect American farmers, so American farmers should stop complaining about those who fund them. American farming is as profitable as it is now precisely due to those subsidies.
      - CountDrewku 5y ago
ipaddr 5y ago
The need for many government programs (money spent on enforcing hollywood copyright) and the tax rules that create corporate wealth but cost other areas must be considered. The midwest could do away with many expensive budget items but are forced to pay a share. The wealth of the nation could flip if heavy import duties were imposed forcing a manufacturing back inhouse. Things are the way they are because the powerful like it.
- foota 5y ago
  > The wealth of the nation could flip if heavy import duties were imposed forcing a manufacturing back inhouse. You mean the wealth of the nation would decrease?
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    Any quality would decrease, and some people value that, so in that argument the wealth of the nation would increase. Most all the income and productivity gains from globalization and go to the wealthy, so if they lost billions of dollars, it is true that the nation would be less “”wealthy””…
    - Aunche 5y ago
      > Most all the income and productivity gains from globalization and go to the wealthy Income gains, perhaps. Productivity gains no. People buy foreign goods because they tend to be significantly cheaper. Capital in the US tends to be reinvested, so we would stagnate in innovation.
    - darksaints 5y ago
      > Most all the income and productivity gains from globalization and go to the wealthy, so if they lost billions of dollars, it is true that the nation would be less “”wealthy””… That's a popular trope, but not really supported by any evidence. Take, for example, sanctuary cities...which can be seen as a form of illicit globalization. The popular trope suggests that undereducated and low income native American citizens would lose by attracting large quantities of low cost labor. But the exact opposite is true: native blue collar employment and wealth increases, welfare dependence and poverty decreases. Perhaps the purveyors of the popular narrative should read up on David Ricardo. It's been 200 years since he died, and people still haven't caught on that more trade is a universal good...something economists have nearly universally accepted for literal centuries now.
BobbyJo 5y ago
I think it's worth considering whether or not rural vs urban is the best way to partition the argument. Cities tend to be very office/payroll dense, and rural areas more home dense. Some of the people who work in the city, and generate some of that revenue, may live in a rural area and consume services there. As far as cost scaling, I kind of disagree. That calculation doesn't work well in the US, where a large portion of the people who work in the city commute. I come from a rural area and live in the bay area now, and I can say without a doubt I spend much more time on the road here. Same with emergency services, they were waaaayyyy better in my (very small and poor) hometown in terms of response times (or responding at all), and I can't see how that would cost more than running the same services here.
- throwaway6734 5y ago
  >Same with emergency services, they were waaaayyyy better in my (very small and poor) hometown in terms of response times (or responding at all), and I can't see how that would cost more than running the same services here. It matters on a per capita basis. What's the ratio of emergency service workers and their salaries to residents in your small and poort hometown compared to the bay area? Also infrastructure (roads, running water, electricity) are much more expensive on a per capita basis than less dense areas
  - BobbyJo 5y ago
    I'll agree with the latter point, but I think having less per-capita emergency services is a bug as opposed to a feature. I'd be willing to bet it's a matter of the land/buildings/employees necessary to run such services are far more expensive in areas where land/labor/everything is more expensive.
    - lazyasciiart 5y ago
      There are less absolute services available in rural areas and less services per capita and that lower level of services still costs more per capita to maintain, because for that one ambulance to serve ten people it had to travel 200 miles and took ten hours instead of having ten ambulances serve four people each in two hours.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
The whole "who's subsidizing who" is a bullshit talking point for both sides. The net inflows/outflows from any given state aren't that big on a per capita basis. They're small enough that anyone who either wants to not have to be told what to do by big city liberals or doesn't want to be held back by rural conservatives that would consider it a small price to pay for freedom.
rhacker 5y ago
I think the reason they think it's subsidizing the rich enclaves is because they believe the rich enclaves aren't really working - they're just generating revenue from information advantage. We're just building systems of control and making money from it. Compare that to them cleaning out a grain cart or chopping up a 300 pound pig. What is work? And why did I make nearly $300 today vs them who will make $300 for that pig that they had to raise for 6 months?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- _jal 5y ago
  > Compare that to them cleaning out a grain cart or chopping up a 300 pound pig. Here is employment data on meat industry workers: https://www.epi.org/blog/meat-and-poultry-worker-demographics/ https://www.epi.org/blog/meat-and-poultry-worker-demographic... Here is ag farming: http://www.ncfh.org/facts-about-agricultural-workers.html http://www.ncfh.org/facts-about-agricultural-workers.html The people you are holding up as exemplars are not the people who hold the views you're discussing.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  > And why did I make nearly $300 today vs them who will make $300 for that pig that they had to raise for 6 months? Effort has little to do with value. Utility also has little to do with value. See the diamond/water paradox for that second part. There are certainly abuses in our society, rent seeking and outright fraud exist. But this childish rejection of capitalism that’s become trendy lately is tiresome. Capitalism is a technology that lifted billions out of poverty. Brilliant, earnest people (as well as some very evil people) tried alternatives in the last century and they failed horribly. No one has proposed plausible alternatives. By all means we ought to couple capitalism in the private sector with a robust public sector, but to be against capitalism at this point is to be against human flourishing.
  - mr_toad 5y ago
    > become trendy lately It’s not a new phenomenon, or unique to America or the west. You can dozens of passages of the bible critical of the merchants and money makers, and many of them are arguments still echoed today.
icelancer 5y ago
Often forgotten about "subsidization" of one group to another - which area is more likely to have higher participation in the military and armed forces, and deaths in foreign conflict zones?
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  Judging by the racial makeup of the military, probably inner city neighborhoods have a disproportionate amount of military participation.
- kasey_junk 5y ago
  The military doesn’t track deaths in combat zones by race. They do track participation: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military Per those numbers whites/blacks/Hispanics are more represented in the military than similar civilian occupations. There is a higher percentage of Hispanic and black women in the military that might lower combat death numbers but there are a lot less high level black & Hispanic high level officers to make up for that. It’s a long way of saying there isn’t good data on this but the US military is an extremely diverse group especially at the enlisted level.
  - remarkEon 5y ago
    The diversity of the military respective to the civilian population is not uniform (no pun intended). There are significant racial differences between services, and branches within services (e.g. infantry versus a combat support branch like quartermaster). It's very difficult to find accurate public data on this subject, but "the military is extremely diverse" is not as clear cut a statement as many seem to think it is.
    - kasey_junk 5y ago
      Sure. The document I listed shows a pretty outsized portion of the marines & Air Force are white. But the fact remains the military is more diverse than the civilian work force. Which given no other data implies we can rule out arguments that military service is a particularly interesting form of sacrifice for the USA in racial dimensions.
vineyardmike 5y ago
I drove through a few of the counties (eg. baker) mentioned in the article to visit a dog breeder, and the breeder had (nearly) her own highway exit. Complete with 2 overpasses. Must cost millions to build and maintain. Her house was the only one visible for as far as you could see from that exit. All i could think about was how much better her life was for that exit and how all her total tax income forever could never ever come close to covering the costs society bore to build that exit. I have always lived in very liberal, expensive, coastal cities and have always heard talking points about waste on welfare to cover poor inner-city americans (typically by rural/suburban conservatives), and all i could think was how backwards this was, and how many families could be fed by the cost of this one exit ramp. Does this mean that society shouldn't build that ramp? I don't know because rural farmland obviously needs to access the rest of society (to ship food), and everyone sorta deserves to access the road system
- rhexs 5y ago
  How many families are you going to feed with that extra million you saved now that the numerous farms you couldn’t see from the highway overpass can no longer ship food? “I have always lived in very liberal, expensive, coastal cities” — please, please venture out of your safe bubble more, for the sake of all of us. Go tour a real farm, not the local micro-organic commune one nearby. See how they work.
  - vineyardmike 5y ago
    Obviously we still need to be able to ship food, i said that. I don't live in those cities by choice (well, i chose jobs there... lots of tech in BOS/SF/etc).
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  There's a false dichotomy, because everyone in the US is subsidising a super-caste of 0.1%ers. They're the ones who pay PR companies, think tanks, and other influencers to create the illusion of consensus narratives by generating these talking points and making sure they're repeated by various apparently independent sources. It makes it almost impossible to argue the merits of public subsidy funding on its own terms because the truth about costs and benefits is aggressively obscured.
iammisc 5y ago
> A lot of people in America seem to believe that the hardworking "real Americans" in the middle of the country are subsidizing the poorly-run coastal liberal enclaves. In reality, the money almost always flows in the other direction; taxpayers in cities are subsidizing the rural-dwellers. This has nothing to do with work ethic, it's just a hard fact that a lot of costs scale with square miles instead of with people (roads, emergency services), and that lower cost of living in the country leads to lower incomes which lead to lower tax revenue. You've made up this narrative of what 'the other side' thinks. I'll recast it for you. * start narrative * A lot of people in america seem to believe that their wages have stagnated while witnessing the wages of those living on the coast, who often disagree politically with them, rise stratospherically. To them it seems like the coastal elites do nothing, while they are quite literally breaking their backs to earn a paltry wage, that they then owe to the very coastal elites they feel are doing nothing. It seems like they take the money, pay it in taxes, subsidize us and tell us we should grovel to them for it, while simultaneously opposing policies we feel would reduce the dependence. For example, they tell us we can't water our farms because of 'global warming', and instead should rely on their benevolence. But we don't want that benevolence. * end narrative * When you put it that way, you realize the 'hardworking real Americans' actually have a lot in common with far-left labor activists. And you'd be right. It would behoove everyone to have more compassion and charity towards their countrymen. Anyway, there is a drastic shift in the Republican party that has gone completely unnoticed. Trump, everything from his personality to his tactics are more reminiscent of the pre-neo-liberal democrat party establishment than anything else. There is a real warming up of the republican base to social programs, government spending, and unions, so long as those institutions prioritize what they believe to be important issues. This is a far cry from the anti-spending, anti-union GOP of old.
- foobiter 5y ago
  hard to have compassion for your countrymen when they think you don’t belong in the country…
- joshka 5y ago
  How does this viewpoint square up with the partisan divide over $15 minimum wage?
adventured 5y ago
> A lot of people in America seem to believe that the hardworking "real Americans" in the middle of the country are subsidizing the poorly-run coastal liberal enclaves. By far the most heavily subsidized, most expensive, poorest and least educated people in the United States are the poor living in urban zones. It's not even remotely a close comparison in terms of numbers. You can see it in the crime statistics, you can see it in the drop-out rates, you can see it in the homelessness rates. And so on. You can also see it in the cost of incarcerating violent criminals (not drug offenders, which are a shrinking, smaller share of the incarcerated population), which urban zones produce radically more of to go with the extreme poverty found in US cities. The urban zones - which are hyper dangerous in the US - produce the overwhelming share of all murder in the country. Who pays for the very expensive policing necessary to keep terrorist groups from burning Portland to the ground? That isn't going on in rural Oregon. Who pays for the very expensive policing to try to control the extreme murder rates in Baltimore or Chicago? That isn't going on in rural Maryland or Illinois; the per capita murder rates in Baltimore are 50x to 100x higher than in rural Maryland. These things are all subsidized by the urban high income brackets, and it's a huge cost. And it's also true that the urban zones have far higher incomes, so they pay higher taxes and push more money into the welfare system accordingly. They subsidize both their local urban poor and the rural poor outside the cities. The bottom 10% in Los Angeles represent a de facto third world standard of living and it's a very large population. Those shocking, unbelievable homeless camps in Los Angeles look like something out of a sci-fi dystopian movie. And that's just a very small fraction, a small visual representation, of the extreme poverty in cities like Los Angeles or Chicago.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  Rural areas are pretty similar. Just fewer people. Trailer parks instead of projects. Same crime, same misery. The stuff that shocks the soul is a small fraction of the struggle and misery.
- halostatue 5y ago
  [citation required]
- matchbok 5y ago
kemiller 5y ago
This particular movement, to its credit, seems to acknowledge this flow of money. It's about morality and control for them.
- halostatue 5y ago
  I think it’s about something that they aren’t talking about openly.
- HillRat 5y ago
  Oh, they talk a lot about the financial benefits — lower income taxes, looser land regulations — it’s just that the personal costs of a lower minimum wage, increased sales taxes, and less educational funding from the state aren’t going to fall on the people who are driving this.
AshWolfy 5y ago
These days its more a massive accumulation of debt and unfunded liabilities in suburbs and rural areas, but basically yeah
dataflow 5y ago
I'm confused at how you go directly from "subsidizing" to money flow. By taking a low-paying job that makes middle-class life possible for you, aren't they foregoing income (and thus isn't this costing them)? Heck, push it to the limit—if a farmer's wages were $0, who's benefiting at the expense of whom here? Who's subsidizing who? If you never see the cash, vs. having it deposited and then withdrawn from your account, does that suddenly change the direction of the subsidy? Does the intrinsic/moral direction of a subsidy necessarily need to match the technical/legal definition? I'm no expert in this, but as a layman, the question of who's subsidizing who is really only meaningful if you look at it from a human/moral standpoint rather than a purely legal/technical one. Otherwise you're using it to solve math problems, not human problems. And the latter seems like a really tough nut to crack to me. I don't know how to do it personally, so I don't know who's right. But I don't get how people talk about it as if it's some patently obvious thing you can figure out by looking at tax dollars or cash flow in the economy. It seems to me you'd need to assign some intrinsic moral value to all jobs so you can compare them against what they "should" cost or what they're "worth", and that is pretty darn difficult by itself, let alone the subsequent political controversy that would surely follow if such a thing was done.
- URSpider94 5y ago
  Here's the point, and I'll lay my cards on the table as being more progressive in the political spectrum. Progressives, by and large, don't actually care that our tax money goes to help a lot of other people. We actually like it, in fact. I do think that I should help subsidize the costs of providing things like postal service and broadband internet to people who live in the middle of nowhere. The paradox is that conservatives and libertarians are the ones who get all worked up about their tax money being spent to help others when, in reality, they are more likely to be net beneficiaries.
  - dataflow 5y ago
    Oh, I see. Thanks for clarifying, I see what you mean.

UncleOxidant 5y ago

Part of this has to do with how we've been able to drive down agricultural costs by means of automation over the last century which has driven a move away from family farms to larger corporate farms. In 1900, just under 40 percent of the total US population lived on farms, and 60 percent lived in rural areas. Today, the respective figures are only about 1 percent and 20 percent.[1] Sure the coasts are creating more economic output by far, but people need to eat food. Agriculture is always going to be important, but lot less people are involved in it than ever before. This is part of what's led to the urban/rural divide where the rural folks feel left out - there just aren't as many of them as populations have migrated to cities. This is why people in rural areas feel increasingly left out. It's mostly due to economic forces that are out of their control. [1] http://jaysonlusk.com/blog/2016/6/26/the-evolution-of-american-agriculture http://jaysonlusk.com/blog/2016/6/26/the-evolution-of-americ...

URSpider94 5y ago
I definitely don't think we should ignore or minimize the contributions of rural Americans. I do think we need to do a better job of making the costs associated with rural life more explicit. This is a big deal in California, where people have pushed further and further into the wilderness, putting themselves at huge risk for wildfires while also increasing the number of miles of power lines that need to be built and maintained; these very power lines are one of the main causes of wildfires.
- causality0 5y ago
  New power lines are almost never the cause of wildfires. Old, poorly-maintained lines are. For example, the Camp fire that killed 86 people was caused by a hundred year old line that hadn't been serviced in decades. For miles of line around the origin site of the fire the C-hooks looked like this: https://i.imgur.com/r42KsHR.jpg https://i.imgur.com/r42KsHR.jpg
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Total installed powerline length vs population is a problem. Whether they're new / old or well / poorly serviced is just a difference of a few decades. If there isn't money to service old lines now, then there won't be money to service formerly-new lines in 30 years.
    - causality0 5y ago
      It's not a question of insufficient funds. They spent five billion dollars on shareholder dividends while corporate documents show they were completely aware the equipment was breaking down and posed a wildfire risk, and they broke multiple state regulations to do so.
      - d110af5ccf 5y ago
        Some background to add to the above: https://twitter.com/tubetimeus/status/1306366930899460097 https://twitter.com/tubetimeus/status/1306366930899460097 and https://www.buttecounty.net/Portals/30/CFReport/PGE-THE-CAMP-FIRE-PUBLIC-REPORT.pdf https://www.buttecounty.net/Portals/30/CFReport/PGE-THE-CAMP...
        zbrozek 5y ago
        The Camp fire report was riveting after-work reading. The financial engineering to avoid opex and instead magnify capex as a way to bilk the ratepayer is ingenious and evil. Further, their operating procedures and culture seem carefully engineered as a liability dodge. Read the report, it's amazing.
ghaff 5y ago
You have to be careful with the 80/20 US Census split numbers between urban/rural. Between myself and a couple neighbors, we're on 100 acres next to even more conservation land. One neighbor has an apple orchard. Another a Christmas tree farm. The town I'm in is considered urban because we're near a major city and adjacent to another small city.
- philistine 5y ago
  But you are urban. You are near a major city, and adjacent another small one like you said. Urban versus rural is not a measure of closeness to nature, it's a measure of closeness to other humans.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    It depends on your definitions. A lot of people would object to defining urban as encompassing having to drive anywhere except to connect to immediate neighbors. I can basically go to my two immediate neighbors. Otherwise I have to get in a car. Is that urban?
    - thoughtstheseus 5y ago
      Sounds like a suburb. The real inefficient structures.
      - briefcomment 5y ago
        In what suburb do you have only two neighbors within walking distance?
        mrcartmenez 5y ago
        Does America have a concept of walking distance?
        ghaff 5y ago
u801e 5y ago
This has also happened to manufacturing and coal mining to a certain extent. But, unlike agriculture, the demand for certain resources like coal is significantly less than it used to be, but people in the affected areas haven't been able to find work in other fields.
- xxpor 5y ago
  Because they're not willing to move.
  - u801e 5y ago
    It takes money to move, and it's unlikely they have the financial resources to handle living in an area with a significantly higher cost of living, unless the job pays very well. Given the fact that public school graduation rates are relatively low where they live, it's unlikely they would be able to secure one of those high paying jobs if they don't have at least a high school diploma or GED.
threatofrain 5y ago
But only a slim slice of rural living is on farms, or are you talking about immigrant Latinos who are left out of the political picture? The supermajority of people working American farms and meat shops are Latino immigrants.
4cidix 5y ago
this is nonsense. SALT deductions make it so that the wealthy (including limousine liberals) don't pay taxes
maxerickson 5y ago
Farms have gotten bigger, but family farms still dominate. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-structure-and-organization/farm-structure/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-structure-... I guess you can argue that a large closely held company isn't a family farm, but it isn't what "corporate" is meant to conjure up either.
- relaxing 5y ago
  The majority of production comes from a small minority of farms with > $1MM ARR. Most are still family owned, but I would argue they are “what corporate is meant to conjure up” in the sense of the scale and methods driving the farming operation (just not the legal structure and governance.) That’s why the overall number of farms and farmers has gone down - the little guy can’t make it work economically.
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    But they are the little guys, they just swallowed a few neighbors. People complaining about corporate farming are talking about outside money coming in and taking the land.

thepasswordis 5y ago

Those people in the middle of the country believe that if they all quit their jobs and demanded a government-given wage, that the country would starve to death. If all of the people at facebook, google, and twitter quit their jobs, however, all that would really happen would be that the country would get a bit more peaceful. You're talking about how much is taken in taxes. These people are talking about how much is given in life.

hackyhacky 5y ago
Sounds like someone's been watching a bit too much Fox Propaganda. Farms are already subsidized by the government. Imports are already subject to tariffs precisely to protect farmers. Who do you think pays for those subsidies, and who pays for the tariffs? Yeah, the "coastal elites" that you've been trained to hate. In farmers stopped benefiting from the largess of the coast, _they_ would starve to death, and everyone else would have cheaper food.
- CountDrewku 5y ago
  Just FYI if they starve to death there's no one to plant or harvest the food. Also, if your argument is that the subsidies are unnecessary that would indicate that farming is profitable and they would in fact not starve to death. The point you're trying to make kinda collapsed on itself bud.
  - hackyhacky 5y ago
    Your reading comprehension skills are terrible. 1. In this hypothetical situation, the cheaper food comes from abroad, now that there are no import tariffs. 2. I never said subsidies aren't necessary: I don't know how you can infer that point from what I wrote. I said that subsidies exist to protect American farmers, so American farmers should stop complaining about those who fund them. American farming is as profitable as it is now precisely due to those subsidies.
    - CountDrewku 5y ago

ipaddr 5y ago

The need for many government programs (money spent on enforcing hollywood copyright) and the tax rules that create corporate wealth but cost other areas must be considered. The midwest could do away with many expensive budget items but are forced to pay a share. The wealth of the nation could flip if heavy import duties were imposed forcing a manufacturing back inhouse. Things are the way they are because the powerful like it.

foota 5y ago
> The wealth of the nation could flip if heavy import duties were imposed forcing a manufacturing back inhouse. You mean the wealth of the nation would decrease?
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Any quality would decrease, and some people value that, so in that argument the wealth of the nation would increase. Most all the income and productivity gains from globalization and go to the wealthy, so if they lost billions of dollars, it is true that the nation would be less “”wealthy””…
  - Aunche 5y ago
    > Most all the income and productivity gains from globalization and go to the wealthy Income gains, perhaps. Productivity gains no. People buy foreign goods because they tend to be significantly cheaper. Capital in the US tends to be reinvested, so we would stagnate in innovation.
  - darksaints 5y ago
    > Most all the income and productivity gains from globalization and go to the wealthy, so if they lost billions of dollars, it is true that the nation would be less “”wealthy””… That's a popular trope, but not really supported by any evidence. Take, for example, sanctuary cities...which can be seen as a form of illicit globalization. The popular trope suggests that undereducated and low income native American citizens would lose by attracting large quantities of low cost labor. But the exact opposite is true: native blue collar employment and wealth increases, welfare dependence and poverty decreases. Perhaps the purveyors of the popular narrative should read up on David Ricardo. It's been 200 years since he died, and people still haven't caught on that more trade is a universal good...something economists have nearly universally accepted for literal centuries now.

BobbyJo 5y ago

I think it's worth considering whether or not rural vs urban is the best way to partition the argument. Cities tend to be very office/payroll dense, and rural areas more home dense. Some of the people who work in the city, and generate some of that revenue, may live in a rural area and consume services there. As far as cost scaling, I kind of disagree. That calculation doesn't work well in the US, where a large portion of the people who work in the city commute. I come from a rural area and live in the bay area now, and I can say without a doubt I spend much more time on the road here. Same with emergency services, they were waaaayyyy better in my (very small and poor) hometown in terms of response times (or responding at all), and I can't see how that would cost more than running the same services here.

throwaway6734 5y ago
>Same with emergency services, they were waaaayyyy better in my (very small and poor) hometown in terms of response times (or responding at all), and I can't see how that would cost more than running the same services here. It matters on a per capita basis. What's the ratio of emergency service workers and their salaries to residents in your small and poort hometown compared to the bay area? Also infrastructure (roads, running water, electricity) are much more expensive on a per capita basis than less dense areas
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  I'll agree with the latter point, but I think having less per-capita emergency services is a bug as opposed to a feature. I'd be willing to bet it's a matter of the land/buildings/employees necessary to run such services are far more expensive in areas where land/labor/everything is more expensive.
  - lazyasciiart 5y ago
    There are less absolute services available in rural areas and less services per capita and that lower level of services still costs more per capita to maintain, because for that one ambulance to serve ten people it had to travel 200 miles and took ten hours instead of having ten ambulances serve four people each in two hours.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

The whole "who's subsidizing who" is a bullshit talking point for both sides. The net inflows/outflows from any given state aren't that big on a per capita basis. They're small enough that anyone who either wants to not have to be told what to do by big city liberals or doesn't want to be held back by rural conservatives that would consider it a small price to pay for freedom.

rhacker 5y ago

I think the reason they think it's subsidizing the rich enclaves is because they believe the rich enclaves aren't really working - they're just generating revenue from information advantage. We're just building systems of control and making money from it. Compare that to them cleaning out a grain cart or chopping up a 300 pound pig. What is work? And why did I make nearly $300 today vs them who will make $300 for that pig that they had to raise for 6 months?

deleted 5y ago
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_jal 5y ago
> Compare that to them cleaning out a grain cart or chopping up a 300 pound pig. Here is employment data on meat industry workers: https://www.epi.org/blog/meat-and-poultry-worker-demographics/ https://www.epi.org/blog/meat-and-poultry-worker-demographic... Here is ag farming: http://www.ncfh.org/facts-about-agricultural-workers.html http://www.ncfh.org/facts-about-agricultural-workers.html The people you are holding up as exemplars are not the people who hold the views you're discussing.
bradleyjg 5y ago
> And why did I make nearly $300 today vs them who will make $300 for that pig that they had to raise for 6 months? Effort has little to do with value. Utility also has little to do with value. See the diamond/water paradox for that second part. There are certainly abuses in our society, rent seeking and outright fraud exist. But this childish rejection of capitalism that’s become trendy lately is tiresome. Capitalism is a technology that lifted billions out of poverty. Brilliant, earnest people (as well as some very evil people) tried alternatives in the last century and they failed horribly. No one has proposed plausible alternatives. By all means we ought to couple capitalism in the private sector with a robust public sector, but to be against capitalism at this point is to be against human flourishing.
- mr_toad 5y ago
  > become trendy lately It’s not a new phenomenon, or unique to America or the west. You can dozens of passages of the bible critical of the merchants and money makers, and many of them are arguments still echoed today.

icelancer 5y ago

Often forgotten about "subsidization" of one group to another - which area is more likely to have higher participation in the military and armed forces, and deaths in foreign conflict zones?

rootusrootus 5y ago
Judging by the racial makeup of the military, probably inner city neighborhoods have a disproportionate amount of military participation.
kasey_junk 5y ago
The military doesn’t track deaths in combat zones by race. They do track participation: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military Per those numbers whites/blacks/Hispanics are more represented in the military than similar civilian occupations. There is a higher percentage of Hispanic and black women in the military that might lower combat death numbers but there are a lot less high level black & Hispanic high level officers to make up for that. It’s a long way of saying there isn’t good data on this but the US military is an extremely diverse group especially at the enlisted level.
- remarkEon 5y ago
  The diversity of the military respective to the civilian population is not uniform (no pun intended). There are significant racial differences between services, and branches within services (e.g. infantry versus a combat support branch like quartermaster). It's very difficult to find accurate public data on this subject, but "the military is extremely diverse" is not as clear cut a statement as many seem to think it is.
  - kasey_junk 5y ago
    Sure. The document I listed shows a pretty outsized portion of the marines & Air Force are white. But the fact remains the military is more diverse than the civilian work force. Which given no other data implies we can rule out arguments that military service is a particularly interesting form of sacrifice for the USA in racial dimensions.

vineyardmike 5y ago

I drove through a few of the counties (eg. baker) mentioned in the article to visit a dog breeder, and the breeder had (nearly) her own highway exit. Complete with 2 overpasses. Must cost millions to build and maintain. Her house was the only one visible for as far as you could see from that exit. All i could think about was how much better her life was for that exit and how all her total tax income forever could never ever come close to covering the costs society bore to build that exit. I have always lived in very liberal, expensive, coastal cities and have always heard talking points about waste on welfare to cover poor inner-city americans (typically by rural/suburban conservatives), and all i could think was how backwards this was, and how many families could be fed by the cost of this one exit ramp. Does this mean that society shouldn't build that ramp? I don't know because rural farmland obviously needs to access the rest of society (to ship food), and everyone sorta deserves to access the road system

rhexs 5y ago
How many families are you going to feed with that extra million you saved now that the numerous farms you couldn’t see from the highway overpass can no longer ship food? “I have always lived in very liberal, expensive, coastal cities” — please, please venture out of your safe bubble more, for the sake of all of us. Go tour a real farm, not the local micro-organic commune one nearby. See how they work.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  Obviously we still need to be able to ship food, i said that. I don't live in those cities by choice (well, i chose jobs there... lots of tech in BOS/SF/etc).
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
There's a false dichotomy, because everyone in the US is subsidising a super-caste of 0.1%ers. They're the ones who pay PR companies, think tanks, and other influencers to create the illusion of consensus narratives by generating these talking points and making sure they're repeated by various apparently independent sources. It makes it almost impossible to argue the merits of public subsidy funding on its own terms because the truth about costs and benefits is aggressively obscured.

iammisc 5y ago

> A lot of people in America seem to believe that the hardworking "real Americans" in the middle of the country are subsidizing the poorly-run coastal liberal enclaves. In reality, the money almost always flows in the other direction; taxpayers in cities are subsidizing the rural-dwellers. This has nothing to do with work ethic, it's just a hard fact that a lot of costs scale with square miles instead of with people (roads, emergency services), and that lower cost of living in the country leads to lower incomes which lead to lower tax revenue. You've made up this narrative of what 'the other side' thinks. I'll recast it for you. * start narrative * A lot of people in america seem to believe that their wages have stagnated while witnessing the wages of those living on the coast, who often disagree politically with them, rise stratospherically. To them it seems like the coastal elites do nothing, while they are quite literally breaking their backs to earn a paltry wage, that they then owe to the very coastal elites they feel are doing nothing. It seems like they take the money, pay it in taxes, subsidize us and tell us we should grovel to them for it, while simultaneously opposing policies we feel would reduce the dependence. For example, they tell us we can't water our farms because of 'global warming', and instead should rely on their benevolence. But we don't want that benevolence. * end narrative * When you put it that way, you realize the 'hardworking real Americans' actually have a lot in common with far-left labor activists. And you'd be right. It would behoove everyone to have more compassion and charity towards their countrymen. Anyway, there is a drastic shift in the Republican party that has gone completely unnoticed. Trump, everything from his personality to his tactics are more reminiscent of the pre-neo-liberal democrat party establishment than anything else. There is a real warming up of the republican base to social programs, government spending, and unions, so long as those institutions prioritize what they believe to be important issues. This is a far cry from the anti-spending, anti-union GOP of old.

foobiter 5y ago
hard to have compassion for your countrymen when they think you don’t belong in the country…
joshka 5y ago
How does this viewpoint square up with the partisan divide over $15 minimum wage?

adventured 5y ago

> A lot of people in America seem to believe that the hardworking "real Americans" in the middle of the country are subsidizing the poorly-run coastal liberal enclaves. By far the most heavily subsidized, most expensive, poorest and least educated people in the United States are the poor living in urban zones. It's not even remotely a close comparison in terms of numbers. You can see it in the crime statistics, you can see it in the drop-out rates, you can see it in the homelessness rates. And so on. You can also see it in the cost of incarcerating violent criminals (not drug offenders, which are a shrinking, smaller share of the incarcerated population), which urban zones produce radically more of to go with the extreme poverty found in US cities. The urban zones - which are hyper dangerous in the US - produce the overwhelming share of all murder in the country. Who pays for the very expensive policing necessary to keep terrorist groups from burning Portland to the ground? That isn't going on in rural Oregon. Who pays for the very expensive policing to try to control the extreme murder rates in Baltimore or Chicago? That isn't going on in rural Maryland or Illinois; the per capita murder rates in Baltimore are 50x to 100x higher than in rural Maryland. These things are all subsidized by the urban high income brackets, and it's a huge cost. And it's also true that the urban zones have far higher incomes, so they pay higher taxes and push more money into the welfare system accordingly. They subsidize both their local urban poor and the rural poor outside the cities. The bottom 10% in Los Angeles represent a de facto third world standard of living and it's a very large population. Those shocking, unbelievable homeless camps in Los Angeles look like something out of a sci-fi dystopian movie. And that's just a very small fraction, a small visual representation, of the extreme poverty in cities like Los Angeles or Chicago.

Spooky23 5y ago
Rural areas are pretty similar. Just fewer people. Trailer parks instead of projects. Same crime, same misery. The stuff that shocks the soul is a small fraction of the struggle and misery.
halostatue 5y ago
[citation required]
matchbok 5y ago

kemiller 5y ago

This particular movement, to its credit, seems to acknowledge this flow of money. It's about morality and control for them.

halostatue 5y ago
I think it’s about something that they aren’t talking about openly.
HillRat 5y ago
Oh, they talk a lot about the financial benefits — lower income taxes, looser land regulations — it’s just that the personal costs of a lower minimum wage, increased sales taxes, and less educational funding from the state aren’t going to fall on the people who are driving this.

AshWolfy 5y ago

These days its more a massive accumulation of debt and unfunded liabilities in suburbs and rural areas, but basically yeah

dataflow 5y ago

I'm confused at how you go directly from "subsidizing" to money flow. By taking a low-paying job that makes middle-class life possible for you, aren't they foregoing income (and thus isn't this costing them)? Heck, push it to the limit—if a farmer's wages were $0, who's benefiting at the expense of whom here? Who's subsidizing who? If you never see the cash, vs. having it deposited and then withdrawn from your account, does that suddenly change the direction of the subsidy? Does the intrinsic/moral direction of a subsidy necessarily need to match the technical/legal definition? I'm no expert in this, but as a layman, the question of who's subsidizing who is really only meaningful if you look at it from a human/moral standpoint rather than a purely legal/technical one. Otherwise you're using it to solve math problems, not human problems. And the latter seems like a really tough nut to crack to me. I don't know how to do it personally, so I don't know who's right. But I don't get how people talk about it as if it's some patently obvious thing you can figure out by looking at tax dollars or cash flow in the economy. It seems to me you'd need to assign some intrinsic moral value to all jobs so you can compare them against what they "should" cost or what they're "worth", and that is pretty darn difficult by itself, let alone the subsequent political controversy that would surely follow if such a thing was done.

URSpider94 5y ago
Here's the point, and I'll lay my cards on the table as being more progressive in the political spectrum. Progressives, by and large, don't actually care that our tax money goes to help a lot of other people. We actually like it, in fact. I do think that I should help subsidize the costs of providing things like postal service and broadband internet to people who live in the middle of nowhere. The paradox is that conservatives and libertarians are the ones who get all worked up about their tax money being spent to help others when, in reality, they are more likely to be net beneficiaries.
- dataflow 5y ago
  Oh, I see. Thanks for clarifying, I see what you mean.