Yeah, I'm not sure how people would handle having half of their guns made illegal, having to learn new traffic laws, having you taxes completely change to the point where your state income taxes can go from 0% to 15%, your house becomes illegal because of different building regulations, public schools become charter schools, marijuana suddenly becomes illegal and you're a marijuana farmer, and this happens every 10 years or so. It would be chaos and require a fundamentally different kind of government organization.
Those would solely be rural problems, and we have a long tradition of support the urbanite and crush the ruralite whenever possible, so it would be politically consistent to do exactly that.
Eh, rural areas actually receive more in federal funding than they pay in taxes while paying less in taxes anyway due to decreased costs of living. Additionally, the US heavily subsidizes farming and funds infrastructure development for rural areas that are not available to more populated states and areas, such as gas, electric, and internet services. Economically speaking, rural areas also disproportionately benefit from projects like interstate highways, public water infrastructure, and bridges. Additionally, rural areas also consume, by far, the most in entitlement resources. And finally, rural areas are disproportionately represented in government, to the point that someone in a city like New York gets nearly half the amount of votes as someone in Montana, and also greatly suffering in the Senate which is not awarded on the basis of population. To sum up, rural areas pay no net taxes, receive economically beneficial subsidies and policies, and are given more political rights than people who live in urban areas. The idea that they're being screwed in a nation where they're the ones with all the control is absurd.
I think the key observation is this: everything you say is true, and yet many rural areas still have terrible economies.
It's hard to square that circle -- that rural areas are heavily subsidized but yet still economically depressed and under-served. Hence, comments like the one from VLM above.
Of course, it all boils down to economic fundamentals: cities and metro areas create a network effect that's difficult or impossible to compete with, no matter how well subsidized rural areas are.
The fact that rural areas suffer in spite of their greater representation and massive economic subsidies is a difficult pill for a person from a rural area to swallow. A "they are screwing us" mentality is a much more compelling narrative.
Then could it be that the subsidies are the only thing making rural life livable for many people? In other words, without the subsidy, the economy would be so depressed that people would move to cities.
They voted in an administration who wants to take away all of the subsidies for their poor population.
But they also voted in an administration who wants to massively subsidize their way of life at the expense of the rest of the tax base. Trump's basic economic plan is to use the carrot of access to America's rich suburban and urban markets as a mechanism for increasing domestic manufacturing (largely benefiting rural areas). So suburban and urban residents will be subsidizing artificial marketplaces that inflate the prices they themselves pay for goods.
His major governmental program will be a transportation infrastructure overhaul that will very likely disproportionately be paid for by suburban/rural areas and benefit rural areas.
And more importantly, those rural voters consistently vote for state governments that rob the tax bases of suburban and urban areas to pay for infrastructure that rural areas can't pay for on their own. Particularly for education and transportation infrastructure.
Basically, rural communities in the US are leeches who use their disproportionate access to political power in order to subsidize their unsustainable way of life on the dime of suburban and urban tax payers. And then have the audacity to claim the opposite.
Food comes from land worked worked using tractors designed and built by engineers in cities, in many cases harvesting crops geo-engineered by biologists and chemists in cities. And to the extent that one or more of these conditions isn't true, those are often premium products made possible by demand stemming from choosey consumers mostly living in... cities.
Also, as JoeAltmaier observed, very few people employed in rural areas are actually employed in agriculture. Furthermore, many of the subsidies that are provided to rural areas have nothing to do with -- and aren't necessary for -- agriculture.
Regarding water, rural areas contribute equally to water quality problems and in many cases make highly unsustainable use of water resources -- see California for example. Also, urban areas are often near plentiful fresh water sources anyways (see: Chicago).
The fantasy of farming as a self-sufficient profession disconnected from larger economic networks and holding a privileged place among society's disparate roles is one of the most insufferable aspects of rural culture imo.
I'd be happy to give up agricultural lands in the US in exchange for much less political obstruction and substantial tax cuts. Those new countries would still have to sell their agricultural products on the market, and the nearest urbanized areas would still be some of their largest customers.
Seems like a win-win, right? But, there are significant reasons why the rural areas would never accept that deal. They're addicted to the imbalance of power and urban subsidies.
Agriculture is a strategic asset. What if you were at war and you had no place to buy food? What if a natural disaster in another country will decrease the quantity of produced food - no country will sell you food if they risk hunger. Agriculture has to be sustained even if the cost of crops is higher than on international market. The production capacity has to be larger than actual internal needs. etc.
Are the subsidies over-rated? We have energy coops (which we pay for entirely); we have a road system (the most expensive parts used by everybody); there are some agricultural supports (insurance programs?) but only a tiny fraction of rural residents are in farming. What else?
First, I don't think so. Second, an over-rated subsidy is still a subsidy. So even if they are over-rated, that's still no proof of VLM's statement -- it's more just looking the gift horse in the mouth.
> We have energy coops (which we pay for entirely)
This isn't true everywhere.
> we have a road system (the most expensive parts used by everybody)
Perhaps for the interstate system you could make this case. I'm not sure. Certainly there are cases where the interstate system inconvenience cities for the benefit of an extremely tiny but politically powerful rural district. The same happens with state highways.
But at the state level, rural roads are heavily subsidized. State highways are typically extremely important to rural areas, and those are mostly funded by urban and suburban tax bases.
> but only a tiny fraction of rural residents are in farming
But farming is still very important to local economies in rural areas, even if it's no longer a major employer. Also, "some" is a bit of an understatement -- half a trillion in federal funds over half a decade. And that's just the main farm bill -- excluding other federal and state assistance programs.
> What else?
* Schools for sure. Most states heavily subsidize rural schools in their funding formulas. States and the federal gov't also subsidize rural schools through programs that are not even accounted for by these funding formulas -- e.g. tuition waivers and sometimes even salaries for teachers that teach in rural schools.
* Federal and state entitlement programs -- this one isn't even close to debatable.
* Political representation. Again, not even close to debatable. I consider this independently of all of the other indirect economic benefits that stem from the representation for a lot of reasons. To give one, the conservative social agenda disproportionately targets and complicates the lives of the non-white non-christians concentrated within cities.
Half a trillion over half a decade is 100 billion per year.
I make no claim to the accuracy of the original statistic, but if that is the case and the federal budget is 3.7 trillion [0] that is 2.7 percent of the budget.
I'm not being disingenuous -- the 2014 farm bill has a 5 year life time -- there'll be another big debate when it comes up for renewal in 2018.
The way that I described it is the same way that everyone on both sides of the isle describes it, because it's honest and accurate -- the bill has a five year life time and changes every five years. So if you want to talk about the cost of the farm bill, you talk about the total cost over five years.
> That works out to less than 100 million a year. To three significant digits that is 0% of the budget.
I think you missed some zeros.
(As an aside, Google has a cool feature where it will do math using words so that you don't screw up w/ the number of zeros: https://www.google.com/search?q=half+a+trillion+divided+by+f... -- I find this super helpful b/c I always drop or add zeros when there are so many)
We can argue back and forth about whether it amounts to a subsidy or something else. But if you just look at aggregate cash flows the largest flows from Washington out to rural areas are social security and government paid for medical care (medicare, medicaid, va, ppaca subsidies). The largest flows from the rural areas to Washington are the individual income tax and payroll taxes.
If those are significantly out of line with each other, then the net offset is going to swamp relatively piddly flows like the Connect America Fund or the Rural Utilities Service.
1) I don't think it just so happens that there are more old people in rural areas. It has to do with the respective characteristics of rural and non-rural areas rather than some historical accident.
2) I think even if you excluded those over 65 you would still find net flows as I've described them because rural areas have too many poor people and not enough rich people.
The larger point is that if you look at the United States as a country where we are all in this together, then it makes no difference if the people getting social security disproportionately live in Wyoming and the people making max social security contributions are disproportionately in NY. Individuals might be net contributors or recipients but if the relevant group is Americans than it all sums to zero. Most of the time that's the attitude most Americans adopt. But then when it comes time to try to justify the continued existence of the Senate and the Electoral College all of a sudden it's 1789 again and the States are independent sovereigns that merely turned over a handful of responsibilities to the Federal government. All of a sudden we aren't all Americans after all but instead Wyomingites that want to know why they should be ruled by New Yorkers and Californians.
> I think the key observation is this: everything you say is true, and yet many rural areas still have terrible economies.
Well yes, because the actual physical capital (machines, skilled labor, etc) is concentrated in cities. Increasingly so, in fact, as the economy has become dominated by monopolies and oligopolies.
> Well yes, because the actual physical capital (machines, skilled labor, etc) is concentrated in cities
Yes -- particularly with respect to skilled labor.
And that's largely a good thing for the working class. The alternative is local monopolies on the labor market. Highly skilled workers flock to areas where employers must compete with one another for a very good reason...
> Increasingly so, in fact, as the economy has become dominated by monopolies and oligopolies...
The urban population in the United States sky-rocketed over exactly the same period of time that Lynn and Longman romanticize.
Although I agree with a lot of their concrete policy proposals, I don't think that those policies would do anything to geographically decentralize economic activity.
>Although I agree with a lot of their concrete policy proposals, I don't think that those policies would do anything to geographically decentralize economic activity.
There's a difference between urban and megalopolis urban. Lots of jobs used to be in smaller, regional cities that had several employers available.
Yet there's more to life than mere balance of transfer payments and related economic policy.
How does your average Boston Clinton voting university academic look at, socially and culturally, someone like a Iowa Trump voting corn farmer? This is rhetorical, I know its with a level of disdain and hate and superiority complex like hasn't been seen since Jim Crow laws were a thing.
And note before discussion subject escape velocity was reached, the sub topic was we can't gerrymander rural people into crazy new rules every time the map is redrawn because that would be unfair to them and there is no higher social caste in the USA than the highly respected rural hillbilly so obviously that's a non starter. Back to that topic, I'm surprised there's any opposition at all to some kind of gerrymandering of state borders.
You are drawing a parallel between (a) legalized discrimination and violence against people based on color of their skin, and (b) not caring enough to give even larger handouts to people who claim to be fiercely proud of their independence.
A lot of the infrastructure in rural areas benefits cities, anyways. Having a good freeway between Chicago and Indianapolis helps those cities much more than the random cornfields the freeway happens to go through.
> Inner cities consistently have higher poverty rates than rural or suburban areas.
Citation needed. Urban areas consistently have more millionaires than rural areas.
As to poverty rates, in the US, they are definitely higher in rural areas. For a citation, from the abstract of [1]:
> Although a larger portion of the poor population resides in urban areas, poverty rates are higher and more persistent in rural areas, and research suggests poverty rates increase as rural areas become increasingly remote.
Basically, urban areas have more poor people, but really they have more of all classes of people. If you go to Figure 1, you'll even see that the rate of poverty in category 0 (most urban) is lower than the rate of poverty in all rural categories (4-9)[1].
Besides it being a bad idea anyway, nothing you describe is a) backed up by fact or b) necessarily ethical, if true.
Were the United States government to add a second sub-national set of borders for enumerated purposes such as infrastructure planning, etc., I expect a Constitutional amendment.
> Were the United States government to add a second sub-national set of borders for enumerated purposes such as infrastructure planning, etc., I expect a Constitutional amendment.
> we have a long tradition of support the urbanite and crush the ruralite whenever possible
er, what? the opposite is true. at the federal level we generally give more consideration to sub-urban and rural needs, which i agree with, because cities are social and economic bubbles.
In what sense do you mean this? Taken as a comparative statement, I find it a pretty dubious assertion.
Suburbs are sort of the ultimate bubble. They suffer from all of the typical things that make cities economic bubbles (a few major employers, geographic clustering based on income, ...), without any of the social or (typically but not always) racial diversity that's common in many cities. Oblig PG link is the one about schooling: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
The social bubble of rural areas is rather extreme -- white Christians are massively over-represented compared to the rest of the country and certainly compared to the rest of the world.
The economic bubble of rural areas tends to be far worse than the economic bubble of cities, IMO. Cities can certainly be economic bubbles, but at least those bubbles are typically made up of multiple fairly large sectors. Rural areas tend to have between one and three non-service industries -- farming, maybe some natural resource extraction, once in a while a small hospital, and in very rare cases a major white collar employer in a single sector. The echo chamber is real.
If we think in terms of politics, I never have a hard time finding conservatives talking politics in a bar in a city, but I've never once found a group of (US-style) liberals have a political conversation in a country bar. Cities might be as dark blue as the countryside is dark red, but the sheer size of cities means there are still far more conservatives in a given city than a typical rural area of similar size.
Basically, my impression is that cities are only bubbles in-so-far as they contain representation of almost every cross-section of society -- including the cross-sections that dominate rural areas! Calling that a bubble when compared to suburban and rural areas bubbles seems... dishonest.
Why would you believe that it would happen more frequently than it does now? All of those things would still be controlled by the residents, via government. The people it would affect the most would be those on the outskirts. But, those people are already affected by changing demographics via increasing population and urban expansion.
