I've been on a road trip that I've wanted to do for a very long time.
I drove east to Illinois then am driving southwest to the Pacific Ocean on what's left of Route 66.
That road, or what's left of it, goes through small town rural America.
I've gone through ghost town after ghost town. The towns that aren't abandoned are so deeply depressed it's painful and shameful to see.
Small town rural America has been totally screwed and abandoned by both our government and our citizens.
I understand now why so many republicans are so angry. I don't understand why they can't see why they have been screwed so badly and by whom.
Most of the states and all of the towns are controlled by republicans. People keep voting for them because of social issues like gay marriage and because they don't make much money and wrongly seem to believe that tax cuts are the answer to their financial problems.
Tax cuts have only totally screwed small town rural America. Their roads are so bad. I mean so bad that there were times the rough road and wind has my car literally bouncing down the road. When was the last time their roads were paved? The poverty is just terrible.
This is the result of keeping wages low, no regulation on business and trillions in tax cuts for the rich and big business.
Capitalism is making it worse because there's no money to be made in those areas so they are abandoned by business which results in more depressed economic conditions.
Raising wages will help these people a lot. Not just by increasing their own pay but by increased business from others being paid more. No little tax cut that is temporary will be a solution to such poverty. Higher wages will.
Better education will help a lot. So people don't have to take low wage jobs that require public assistance to be able to survive.
Small town rural America needs to stop electing politicians who don't give a damn about them and won't invest in the people and the areas they live in.
I was in one place that the water coming out of the faucet was a light brown and cloudy. I didn't wash my hands, I used hand sanitizer instead.
I have gone through countless towns that are totally abandoned. I've gone through farming areas that there aren't houses on the land. Just farming. People don't live in those areas anymore so the towns are turning into ghost towns.
The air in Oklahoma and Texas was so polluted it has caused a sinus infection. And people live in those areas. I can only imagine the health problems of the people in those areas but they don't have any hospital or medical facilities to go to. They have to travel hundreds of miles to get medical help.
Younger people who weren't alive before Reagan think this is normal.
It's not.
America wasn't like this before the conservatives convinced Americans that taxes, regulations, worker protections, a livable wage and investing in our nation was a horrible thing.
I totally understand now why so many in small town rural America voted for trump. He was the first republican who actually vocalized the problems the Republican Party was creating.
Only he either went about fixing the problem wrong or just didn't do anything. Which is what he mostly did. Nothing. In fact, things got worse for small town rural America.
I don't know what the solution is to help these people see that voting for republicans got them in this mess and won't get them out of it.
But I finally saw for myself the reasons why republicans voted for trump.
If you want to know what's happened (and is happening) to small town America, it can probably best be summed up by the concept of economies of scale. The trend began under Reagan.
You see, Reagan embraced the idea of massive tax cuts for businesses for a specific stated reason. A little history is in order here.
In the aftermath of WWII, the US was the only major industrial economy with our factories, and shipyards, and transportation system completely intact. Meanwhile, the economies of England, France, Germany, Japan, and the USSR were in ruins. Consequently, we cleaned up during the 1950s and 1960s. Not only did we manufacture consumer goods for them, we rebuilt their industrial base. By the 1970s, countries like Japan were cleaning our clock. They built better quality cars which were also considerably more fuel efficient. In the aftermath of the oil embargos of the 1970s, we were no longer competitive because our industrial base was much older and no longer efficient compared to the other industrial countries.
In comes Reagan with the idea of granting massive tax cuts to businesses in order to help them retool. This is where the law of unintended consequences comes in. Unfortunately, there were insufficient strings attached to the tax cuts indicating how the money had to be spent. As a result, both large and smaller companies went on a corporate buying spree with their windfalls. That's how companies like RJ Reynolds (a tobacco company) ended up buying Nabisco (of food company) to become RJR Nabisco. That's how media companies like ABC, NBC, and CBS ended up being owned by Disney, GE, and Westinghouse. The trend continued for decades even to the point that huge profitable oil companies like Exxon and Mobile felt compelled to merge (like Chevron and Texaco) in order to compete with other oil companies that had merged.
While all of this was happening to the economy as a whole, small towns got hit in ways that weren't as much of an issue in and around large cities.
The first was the exportation of manufacturing jobs. After all, some towns had a major manufacturer that employed hundreds of people, often working several shifts. People referred to them as company towns whether it was a paper plant, an athletic shoe manufacturer, or a company that made bicycles, or refrigerators. Once those jobs started going overseas for cheaper labor, their competitors were forced to follow if they wanted to stay in business. This trend was the opposite of over a hundred years of American policy which was always to protect our industrial base by keeping them here at home.
The second was the growth of Walmart. Previously, small towns had a healthy business class of educated people who owned stores and shops that were operated by small town residents who, in turn, hired locals to work there. Once Walmart moved in and started selling products at prices that undercut the best prices local merchants could offer, it was just a matter of time until the local shops closed their doors, leaving main street with shuttered doors in empty buildings which nobody could afford to rent. Making matter worse, megastores like Walmart took their profits out of these small towns unlike the local shop keepers who spent their profits in their home towns, thereby stimulating their local economy.
Then there's the demise of the family farm. You probably remember the Willie Nelson Farm Aid concerts of the 1990s. As family farms were sold off, agribusinesses like Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM), also known as "The Supermarket to the World," moved in to gobble up thousands of acres of farm land. The remaining family farms couldn't compete based on, you guessed it, the economies of scale.
Finally, with little opportunity and very few jobs available, people in general, especially young people, started moving away to larger cities in search of a better life.
I should know. I came from a small town where the population has declined by over 25% since 1970.
www.justice.gov
