Part of this is causal - if you're on what used to be called "fixed income" (read: social security) you migrate to places where your costs are lower; which is o

Part of this is causal - if you're on what used to be called "fixed income" (read: social security) you migrate to places where your costs are lower; which is often rural areas. Another part is that they're looking at total income over county-levels, which means that one Bill Gates or Elon Musk in your county will wipe out millions of people receiving "transfer payments". > In contrast, many metropolitan hubs, affluent suburbs and exurbs, and high-income, high-productivity farming and mining communities remain minimally reliant on transfer income to power their local economies. This may or may not be true; depends on the money flow, rich cities can have large swaths of poor people.