After the check is gone: The underground economy of rural America

That is so depressing. No wonder suicide rates are up.

You know there's a difference between "give a man a fish" and "teach a man to fish", but what do you do when the fish are just gone?

It was mentioned in the article, but not extensively discussed. I think maybe the largest distinct segment of the economy in ex-coalcountry regions is now pharmaceuticals, legal and illegal. There's the legal root and mushroom hunting, which go into supplements, but a large fraction of the people are growing marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms, collecting sassafras root bark for MDMA cooks, and reselling their prescription opioids, in addition to the older traditions of moonshining and tobacco cigarette smuggling.

And everyone is on social security disability. If all you ever knew is coal mining, that's your condition that prevents you from finding gainful employment. If you need to see what happens with bare-bones basic income, that's it. The whole community barely scrapes along, and everyone has to do some niche hustle to earn their gas money a dime at a time. If you threw out the penalty for working, most of those people would be doing something productive, even if it's manufacturing ugly tchotchkes to be sold in a tourist trap, because whatever it is would give them beef in their stew instead of just barely enough gas in the tank to keep going.

No shit. The tricky thing with this kind of work is it has to be all cash-only, under the table. Best if nobody sees you doing it, which rules out a lot of the more legitimate kinds of side work - if you're supposed to be 80% disabled, it looks a little fishy when you're out cutting lawns or splitting firewood or caretaking... I grew up on the northern end of Appalachia, and huge numbers of people there supplement their income growing a little cash crop out in the woods - you had to be a little careful in places that you didn't blunder into a plantation when you were out deer hunting. I wonder whether the recent legalization pushes are putting a hurting on that front.

> She lit a home-rolled cigarette and, getting to work with a mattock, tried to ignore the weather. She had lately been telling herself that she had to stop taking these risks. They were more than an hour from the nearest hospital, and what if she had another heart attack?

Yeah...she seems to be ignoring the heart-attack risk she is pumping into her lungs while she says that. I get that it's an addiction that is hard to kick, but come on. If you've already had quintuple bypass surgery, maybe it's time to give up smoking?

This is replicated all over the rust belt. One of the saddest portrayals of this is the photo essay, The Ruins of Detroit[1]. These once mighty economic engines have been silenced: manufacturing, coal, etc. What happens next is that the people who depend upon these industries to make a living, and live ... do less well of a job of this.

Some argue that unions would help (they wouldn't), or anti-globalism would stop factories/industries from moving (maybe temporarily). The sad fact remains that industries are, to a degree, tied to regions, and people grow up depending upon those industries in those regions. Once the industry finds a lower cost mechanism to come to market, those dependent people are cut free.

Its the short term, profit focused mindset and all it brings that is a huge part of the problem. Note that I am a staunch capitalist, and I see this.

I don't have a solution to this. I wish I did. None of the political parties have anything close to a solution for this. Giving money directly to people may help for a while, but is likely to spark inflation, which will cause this to repeat in a few years.

I remember one of the political parties crowing about how they saved the auto industry in Michigan during the last major financial crisis. Funny, as I live there, and I remember one of the people who lives in my sub whose business was destroyed by this "saving" thanks to many long held overdue invoices at one of the car company's being zeroed out, coming to my front door, with his son to ask for help. Food specifically.

Foolish policies that do not contemplate consequences for actions, apart from the groups that the politicos favor, help decimate regions like this. Coal is evil as I've heard. And the people who mine it? They are the ones now suffering because, you know, its evil, and coal must die.

Every decision, every policy has consequences. There are never any easy solutions.

(edits to correct spelling/punctuation errors)

[1] http://www.marchandmeffre.com/detroit

The concern I have with this will be inflation. People now have money, sellers can now raise prices. Which eventually gets us right back to where we were. You can give them more money, but then you are accelerating the cycle.