BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG
We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
I am a Pennsylvania Yankee living in Virginia (NOVA / Metro D.C.) and this is about as far South as I could live. There is a voluntary ignorance grounded in racism that I just can't stand among the electorate that is pathetic. These people keep electing gop / tea-bagger extremest that work against the best interest of those who elect them, denying them fair wages, workers rights and the social safety net programs so many of them need while making the rich richer. The picture above is a perfect depiction of many of these people in the deep South and rural South (as well as many of the rural areas of the North, including the part of PA I am from). This from +Daily Kos shows the results of their votes. Also from +The New York Times & +New York Magazine .....
Why any ostensibly rational person living in Kentucky, Tennessee, the
Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana who saw this
map, and still would think their states' Republican leaders' policies
were delivering the economic growth their region so sorely needs is
beyond comprehension. Where Are the Hardest Places to Live in the U.S.?
The toughest places to live in America
Almost every county in the U.S. has its share of haves and have-nots.
But there are some regions where it's just plain harder for Americans
to thrive, places where the poor far outnumber those living in
middle-class comfort.
Ten counties in America stand out as the most challenging places to
live, based on a survey of six criteria including median household
income, disability rate and life expectancy, according to an analysis by
The New York Times.
The county with the dubious distinction of being the worst of all is
Clay County, Kentucky, where residents can expect to die six years
earlier than the average American.
The other four counties ranked at the bottom of the survey
include four counties in the rural south: Humphreys County, Mississippi;
East Carroll Parish, Louisiana; Jefferson County, Georgia; and Lee
County, Arkansas.
The findings highlight an often overlooked issue in the debate about income inequality -- the stubbornness of rural poverty. In
the U.S., the number of poor rural residents outnumber those in the
cities, with 14 percent of rural Americans living below the poverty
line, compared with 12 percent in urban areas, according to the International Fund for Agricultural Development's Rural Poverty Portal.
Of course you'd never get an inkling of any of this from watching Fox
Noise. The right's hired boobs like to characterize America's urban
areas as teeming with desperately poor people.
Of course, Appalachia and the South aren't the only parts of
the country where people struggle, The Times' study found. Pockets of
economic and social hardship extend from Maine to Alaska.
By Roberto A. Ferdman
Meanwhile, there are a number of states — all of them in the South — you might want to avoid. Mississippi,
which scored lower than any other state, barely broke 50. Arkansas and
Alabama, which tied for second to last, each scored 51.3. West Virginia,
which was fourth to last, scored 52.2. And Tennessee, which was fifth
to last, scored 52.9.
The South, which performed the worst of any region in the country, is
home to eight of the poorest performing states. Only Virginia was in
the top 25. And just barely — it placed 22nd.
The average person's life is harder in the South and in Appalachia. The
economic safety net in these states is bare bones and have gaping gaps
that let many their citizens fall through into the economic margins. The
South's and Appalachia's craven political leaderships that grovel
before wealthy interests are the main reason why the region consistently
lags behind the other states across a range of measures.
Originally posted to Lefty Coaster on Sun Oct 19, 2014 at 10:12 PM PDT.
Annie Lowrey writes
in the Times Magazine this week about the troubles of Clay County, Ky.,
which by several measures is the hardest place in America to live.
The
Upshot came to this conclusion by looking at six data points for each
county in the United States: education (percentage of residents with at
least a bachelor’s degree), median household income, unemployment rate,
disability rate, life expectancy and obesity. We then averaged each
county’s relative rank in these categories to create an overall ranking.
(We tried to include other factors, including income mobility and measures of environmental quality, but we were not able to find data sets covering all counties in the United States.)
The
10 lowest counties in the country, by this ranking, include a cluster
of six in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky (Breathitt,
Clay, Jackson, Lee, Leslie and Magoffin), along with four others in
various parts of the rural South: Humphreys County, Miss.; East Carroll
Parish, La.; Jefferson County, Ga.; and Lee County, Ark.
Slide Show
Slide Show|12 Photos
The Hardest Place to Live in America
CreditLuke Sharrett for The New York Times
We
used disability — the percentage of the population collecting federal
disability benefits but not also collecting Social Security retirement
benefits — as a proxy for the number of working-age people who don’t
have jobs but are not counted as unemployed. Appalachian Kentucky scores
especially badly on this count; in four counties in the region, more
than 10 percent of the total population is on disability, a phenomenon
seen nowhere else except nearby McDowell County, W.Va.
Remove
disability from the equation, though, and eastern Kentucky would still
fare badly in the overall rankings. The same is true for most of the
other six factors.
The
exception is education. If you exclude educational attainment, or lack
of it, in measuring disadvantage, five counties in Mississippi and one
in Louisiana rank lower than anywhere in Kentucky. This suggests that
while more people in the lower Mississippi River basin have a college
degree than do their counterparts in Appalachian Kentucky, that
education hasn’t improved other aspects of their well-being.
As
Ms. Lowrey writes, this combination of problems is an overwhelmingly
rural phenomenon. Not a single major urban county ranks in the bottom 20
percent or so on this scale, and when you do get to one — Wayne County,
Mich., which includes Detroit — there are some significant differences.
While Wayne County’s unemployment rate (11.7 percent) is almost as high
as Clay County’s, and its life expectancy (75.1 years) and obesity rate
(41.3 percent) are also similar, almost three times as many residents
(20.8 percent) have at least a bachelor’s degree, and median household
income ($41,504) is almost twice as high.
Wayne
County may not make for the best comparison — in addition to Detroit,
it includes the Grosse Pointes and some other wealthy suburbs that could
be pulling its rankings up. But St. Louis, another struggling city,
stands alone as a jurisdiction for statistical purposes and ranks even
higher over all, slightly, with better education and lower unemployment
making up for a median household income ($34,384) that is lower than
Wayne County’s but still quite a bit higher than Clay County’s $22,296.
At
the other end of the scale, the different variations on our formula
consistently yielded the same result. Six of the top 10 counties in the
United States are in the suburbs of Washington (especially on the
Virginia side of the Potomac River), but the top ranking of all goes to
Los Alamos County, N.M., home of Los Alamos National Laboratory, which
does much of the scientific work underpinning the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
The lab directly employs one out of every five county residents and has a
budget of $2.1 billion; only a fraction of that is spent within the
county, but that’s still an enormous economic engine for a county of
just 18,000 people.
Here
are some specific comparisons: Only 7.4 percent of Clay County
residents have at least a bachelor’s degree, while 63.2 percent do in
Los Alamos. The median household income in Los Alamos County is
$106,426, almost five times what the median Clay County household earns.
In Clay County, 12.7 percent of residents are unemployed, and 11.7
percent are on disability; the corresponding figures in Los Alamos
County are 3.5 percent and 0.3 percent. Los Alamos County’s obesity rate
is 22.8 percent, while Clay County’s is 45.5 percent. And Los Alamos
County residents live 11 years longer, on average — 82.4 years vs. 71.4
years in Clay County.
Clay and Los Alamos Counties are part of the same country. But they are truly different worlds.
The Upshot provides news, analysis and graphics about politics, policy and everyday life. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
There
are many tough places in this country: the ghost cities of Detroit,
Camden and Gary, the sunbaked misery of inland California and the
isolated reservations where Native American communities were left to
struggle. But in its persistent poverty, Eastern Kentucky — land of
storybook hills and drawls — just might be the hardest place to live
in the United States. Statistically speaking.
The team at The Upshot,
a Times news and data-analysis venture, compiled six basic metrics to
give a picture of the quality and longevity of life in each county of
the nation: educational attainment, household income, jobless rate,
disability rate, life expectancy and obesity rate. Weighting each
equally, six counties in eastern Kentucky’s coal country (Breathitt,
Clay, Jackson, Lee, Leslie and Magoffin) rank among the bottom 10.
Clay
County, in dead last, might as well be in a different country. The
median household income there is barely above the poverty line, at
$22,296, and is just over half the nationwide median. Only 7.4 percent
of the population has a bachelor’s degree or higher. The unemployment
rate is 12.7 percent. The disability rate is nearly as high, at 11.7
percent. (Nationwide, that figure is 1.3 percent.) Life expectancy is
six years shorter than average. Perhaps related, nearly half of Clay
County is obese.
It’s
coal country, but perhaps in name only. In the first quarter of this
year, just 54 people were employed in coal mining in Clay County, a
precipitous drop from its coal-production peak in 1980. That year, about
2.5 million tons of coal were taken out of the ground in Clay; this
year, the county has produced a fraction of that — just over 38,000
tons. Former mines have been reclaimed, and that land has been
repurposed in scattershot ways: a golf course, shopping centers, a
medium-security federal prison. But nothing has truly come to replace
the industry on which Clay County once depended.
The
public debate about the haves and the have-nots tends to focus on the 1
percent, especially on the astonishing, breakaway wealth in cities like
New York, San Francisco and Washington and the great disparities
contained therein. But what has happened in the smudge of the country
between New Orleans and Pittsburgh — the Deep South and Appalachia — is
in many ways as remarkable as what has happened in affluent cities. In
some places, decades of growth have failed to raise incomes, and of
late, poverty has become more concentrated not in urban areas but in
rural ones.
Despite
this, rural poverty is largely shunted aside in the conversation about
inequality, much in the way rural areas have been left behind by broader
shifts in the economy. The sheer intractability of rural poverty raises
uncomfortable questions about how to fix it, or to what extent it is
even fixable.
The
desperation in coal country is hard to square with the beauty of the
place — the densely flocked hills peppered with tiny towns. It’s
magical. But it is also poor, even if economic growth and the federal
safety-net programs have drastically improved what that poverty looks
like.
Fifty
years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared his “war on poverty”
from a doorstep in the tiny Kentucky town of Inez, and since then,
Washington has directed trillions of dollars to such communities in the
form of cash assistance, food stamps, Medicaid and tax incentives for
development. (In some places, these transfer payments make up half of
all income.) Still, after adjusting for inflation, median income was
higher in Clay County in 1979 than it is now, even though the American
economy has more than doubled in size.
There
have been periodic attempts to flood persistently poor counties with
federal dollars in an effort to jolt them into higher growth rates. The
Obama administration this year named southeastern Kentucky a “promise
zone,” putting it at the top of the list for federal grants. It’s an old
idea: Draw in businesses, create jobs, help finance infrastructure,
turn the cycle virtuous.
On
the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, Kentucky’s libertarian
senator, Rand Paul, has proposed a more supply-side-oriented strategy:
Let certain counties eliminate capital-gains taxes and institute a
special federal income tax of 5 percent in those areas. “I’m just
letting you keep more of your own money,” Paul said to a small crowd in a
college auditorium in eastern Kentucky last winter. “The difference
between this and a government grant is I don’t choose who gets it.” On
either side of the aisle, the underlying assumption is the same: Places
like Clay County just need a kick-start. But what if that isn’t true?
In
many cases, a primary problem in poor rural areas is the very fact that
they’re rural — remote, miles from major highways and plagued by
substandard infrastructure. Think about the advantages of urban areas,
described by thinkers going back to Jane Jacobs and beyond. Density
means more workers to choose from, more potential customers, more
spillover knowledge from nearby companies. As such, cities punch above
their weight, economically speaking. The 10 largest metro regions
produced more than a third of the country’s entire economic output as of
2012.
The
converse is true for rural areas. Take eastern Kentucky, grappling with
the decline of coal — and perhaps looking at an even bleaker future for
the industry, given recent carbon-reduction efforts by the E.P.A. Those
rolling hills might be picturesque. But those country roads make it
hard to ship goods in and out, in turn making it more expensive to build
a warehouse or a factory.
“One
of the challenges that faces eastern Kentucky is the remoteness of the
area,” said James P. Ziliak, the director of the Center for Poverty
Research at the University of Kentucky. “It’s difficult to get to a lot
of places. The communities are small, and they’re spread apart, so you
lose that synergy that you want to spark development a lot of times.”
Even with additional government subsidies, would businesses really want
to move there? “It’s this chicken-and-egg problem,” Ziliak said. “My
view is that firms will never locate into a community with an unskilled
labor force, unless the only labor they need is unskilled. And there has
been a historic lack of investment in human capital in these areas.”
The
queasy answer that economists come to is that it would be better to
help the people than the place — in some cases, helping people leave the
place. Generally, the wealthier and better educated the family, the
more mobile they are. It takes resources to pack up all your things,
sign a new lease, pay for gas or a flight and go. That might help
explain why more Americans aren’t flocking from places with high
unemployment rates to places with low ones, even if those places are
surprisingly close together. College graduates, for instance, are
several times as responsive to differences in labor demand as those who
completed only high school, according to a study in The Journal of Human
Resources.
But
government policy based less on place and more on people might help
ameliorate that trend. “Let’s say I was a hardworking person who lost my
job in Harlan, Ky. — the ideal place, really, to go is Williston,
N.D.,” Senator Paul said. “People need to be mobile to go there. Some
government programs prevent mobility or discourage mobility.” And none
encourage it: There are scant federal resources to help the unemployed
or the poor in rural areas move to a job or even just a better
neighborhood. (Imagine Senator Mitch McConnell running for re-election
on the campaign slogan: “I’ll get you out of this moribund area and up
to the wilderness of North Dakota!”)
Of
course, thousands of families in places like Kentucky, South Dakota and
West Virginia manage to cobble together enough resources to make the
move themselves; the share of Americans living in rural areas has slowly
drifted down. In Clay County, the population has declined for the last
decade. And the overall population in rural areas declined for the first
time from 2010 to 2012, according to the Census Bureau.
Jeff
Whitehead runs the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program,
which helps retrain laid-off coal miners and find them new jobs.
“There’s just very limited opportunity for the people who were working
in the region,” he said, adding that he helped 220 families move out of
the area in recent years, despite many workers’ understandable
resistance. “That’s a really hard pill to swallow. People are really
connected to place here. For a lot of people, it’s the last thing
they’re doing. They’re holding off until they have no other choice.”
But
the number and proportion of people living in poverty in places like
eastern Kentucky persists, despite all the trillions of dollars spent to
improve the state of the poor in the United States and promote
development. Ziliak thinks that efforts focused on human capital —
meaning education initiatives, from prekindergarten all the way through
college — might be the best use of any new money. But, of course, that
also might mean more people moving away.
Annie Lowrey was, until recently, an economics reporter for The Times. Alan Flippen contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on June 29, 2014, on page MM13 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Bluegrass-State Blues.
IF the banks hadn't done anything wrong they wouldn't be seeking immunity.....join this petition campaign calling on the states not to give them immunity for the economic crimes they have committed against the nation....
Hi, this is Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway. I wanted to make sure you heard about an important issue.
The same Wall Street banks whose irresponsible actions led to our nation's economic collapse are now pressuring all 50 states to give them legal immunity. The banks want to block any criminal or civil accountability for actions that have yet to be investigated.
Attorneys General from Delaware, Minnesota, Nevada and New York have been fighting back. Today, I want to make a clear statement in support of Wall Street accountability and against immunity for banks -- and I ask you to join me on this statement:
"Today's economic crisis was caused by Wall Street acting improperly. Every American has paid the price -- with families losing their homes, investors losing their money, and many Americans losing their jobs. There should be absolutely no criminal or civil immunity given to banks for activity that has not yet been investigated."
Frankly, all elected leaders owe it to their constituents to take this position. If we speak up together, more and more of them will. Sign here.
Today, by adding my voice to this issue, along with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, we are adding momentum to the fight for Wall Street accountability.
These next couple weeks are critical. Key meetings and discussions will determine if Wall Street banks get immunity -- regardless of what they may or may not have done.
Together, we can hold Wall Street accountable to Main Street. Thanks for being a bold progressive.
-- Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway Named The Nation's "Most Valuable Online Activism of 2010"—thanks to you. Help us continue our effective, independent progressive activism.Chip in here.
Paid for by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee PAC (www.BoldProgressives.org) and not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. Contributions to the PCCC are not deductible as charitable contributions for federal income tax purposes.
