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

washingtonpost.com

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

#131

Post by bronson »

549362-30499 wrote: post #111
thaumaturgy wrote: post #99

Logan County, West Virginia, where this article is set, voted 80% in favor of Trump, giving him 10,000 additional votes. [1] The entire state of West Virginia went to Trump. If Democrats want to change the current political landscape in this country, they might start by addressing some of these peoples' problems while they're campaigning on everyone else's problems too. Trump (and conservatives) aren't going to do a…

Clinton did campaign on a jobs and retraining program specifically for these people. But how can you compete with someone saying they'll hand-wave away your problems and return your old way of life?

They don't want retraining, they want their jobs. Remember “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”? http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/sanders-looking-to-rac...

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

#132

Post by rbanffy »

alexanderstears wrote: post #123
549362-30499 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clinton did campaign on a jobs and retraining program specifically for these people. But how can you compete with someone saying they'll hand-wave away your problems and return your old way of life?

How appealing is a retaining program when you're dirty, tired, old, and not able to get to a class room? She didn't campaign on a jobs program, or at least not one that would matter like a jobs guarantee.

Should they just lie instead?

Sometimes reality is not appealing.

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

#133

Post by lazerpants »

noworld wrote: post #127
calt wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who the fuck are you? Imagine having nothing and then being told you can't have the companionship of a dog or even cheap beer because that means you aren't interested in changing your situation.

I'm the person that would rather have clean clothes and a shower, then get a job, washer, dryer, and bed, and THEN worry about the dog and cheap beer later. This is an article about people that can't suppress an urge right now for long term gains and it holds them in perpetual poverty. That's who the fuck I am.

Do you have any experience with actually being this poor and desperate? There's no way to dig yourself out of a pit like this with an extra $12 bucks a month...

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

#134

Post by amigoingtodie »

noworld wrote: post #120
amigoingtodie wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, if she kept the beer, she could 'get out of it'?

Is that what you got out of my post? Really?

Not sure what I was supposed to get out of it.

I assume you have advanced degrees in rhetoric?

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

#135

Post by alexanderstears »

csense wrote: post #122
thaumaturgy wrote: post #99

Logan County, West Virginia, where this article is set, voted 80% in favor of Trump, giving him 10,000 additional votes. [1] The entire state of West Virginia went to Trump. If Democrats want to change the current political landscape in this country, they might start by addressing some of these peoples' problems while they're campaigning on everyone else's problems too. Trump (and conservatives) aren't going to do a…

> Trump (and conservatives) aren't going to do a thing for these people, but at least they mentioned them. One of Trump's campaign promises was to cut back environmental and business regulations and get the coal industry rolling again. He actually did pull out of the Paris climate accord. Is this the right approach? Will Trump's actions help these communities? I'm not sure. But it's simply not true that he's doing no…

I think it is - imagine how much better off these people would be if they spent less on fuel - $50 in gas on a $750 monthly budget is proportionally near what I spend on RENT with my (pre-tax) salary.

I'm not sure coal can compete with fracking so the coal jobs are moot.

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

#136

Post by amigoingtodie »

549362-30499 wrote: post #111
thaumaturgy wrote: post #99

Logan County, West Virginia, where this article is set, voted 80% in favor of Trump, giving him 10,000 additional votes. [1] The entire state of West Virginia went to Trump. If Democrats want to change the current political landscape in this country, they might start by addressing some of these peoples' problems while they're campaigning on everyone else's problems too. Trump (and conservatives) aren't going to do a…

Clinton did campaign on a jobs and retraining program specifically for these people. But how can you compete with someone saying they'll hand-wave away your problems and return your old way of life?

It is a tough sell to take away an $80k/year job and replace it with slightly above minimum wage.

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

#137

Post by dragonwriter »

hpcjoe wrote: post #21
ianai wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. Inflation isn’t the outright awful thing people assume it is. Further, the concept is to give people just enough to survive. That creates demand for only the basics. The basics are largely standardized items. When was the last time there was a shortage in corn, cotton, flour? They’re all commodities. If anything modern prices for these goods and services are likely to be indifferent to the increase in dema…

Its not awful over a short term. Over a longer term, it will price commodities out of reach. I've watched milk prices rise dramatically over the last 5 years or so. This is in part due to the costs of production rising, not necessarily the farm margins. These costs of production rise for any number of reasons, but mostly its because rising costs tend to spread out through the economy. [1] My point is that prices will…

> I've watched milk prices rise dramatically over the last 5 years or so.

Milk is subject to government price supports, including a mandate to purchase if market prices fall below a certain floor.

> My point is that prices will rise and find their time dependent values, in a way that will diminish the purchasing power of those you'd be attempting to help.

It's true to the extent that the long term effect of a fixed UBI will be less than you would expect based on prices at the time adopted and the inflation that net beneficiaries would experience without the UBI. This is mitigated if the UBI formula tends to grow in nominal terms (e.g., because it's tied to a revenue source which grows with the economy, or indexed to inflation) and, in any case, it requires unlikely assumptions about elasticity to have it not be a real net benefit to the nominal net beneficiaries.

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

#138

Post by iamatworknow »

irrational wrote: post #105
pavel_lishin wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not sure why this is an article. This is just normal life in many parts of rural America from Pennsylvania to Washington to Arizona. Plenty of people have no idea that there are people living like this in America.

And plenty of people in these areas have not idea what life is like outside of their rural areas. My brother recently told me a story of talking to two 20 somethings in rural Pennsylvania (not Amish). They had never traveled anywhere outside of their town and had no concept of what it was like to live anywhere else.

I currently live in rural upstate New York. When a longtime friend of mine found out that I would soon be leaving to live in a big city in the south he yelled at me, called me an idiot, and said I would get raped and murdered there.

This is a guy in his mid-30's who has only ever visited a place with more than 10,000 people once, so his entire perception of what it's like in urban America is based off of the salacious news stories he reads online.

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

#139

Post by 24gttghh »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #86
24gttghh wrote: post #6

> 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…

This kind of sentiment is exactly why more liberals need to read more articles like this one. If you've never lived that life, it's easy to sit back and proclaim for someone else how much better things might be for them if only they didn't do things the way they do. It makes it easy to dismiss their problems as entirely their own fault while we get to feel good about giving out some solid advice. Those cigarettes and…

Smoking makes you feel better in the short term because your body is jonesing for that nicotine, and dopamine gets released when you give your body the nicotine. Then you don't smoke, and you feel shitty until the next nicotine hit. You give a poor justification for an addiction, and the happiness is merely a result of the feedback loop of nicotine > dopamine > no nicotine > dopamine crash > nicotine > dopamine > etc. I'm bastardizing the chemical reactions, but you get the idea.

I'm pretty sure medical science would say she is smoking because she's addicted.

If she didn't smoke, she would be less likely to die of a fucking heart attack so she could actually work and be actually healthy. I'm not shitting on all poor people making poor decisions, just this lady who has at least one easily solvable problem (smoking while being a heart surgery survivor).

Healthy living is not a luxury. Not drinking soda/eating junk food every day and walking are quite free if I recall...

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

#140

Post by thehardsphere »

ianai wrote: post #22
hpcjoe wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assume, as the story implies, that they haven't the money to move. Moving costs money. Exactly what should they do? Channeling Marie Antoinette is obviously not the right answer (e.g. moving to the jobs) as they are functionally immobile, and as the article notes, they are disabled. Note: the above question is somewhat rhetorical. There is no real answer, or rather no easy answer. Basic income may help, or it may del…

Also the economy is pretty terrible in most places. That if anything should be the biggest backing for a UBI.

Really? We should subsidize broken economies in perpetuity, by allowing people to stay in them forever? I think that's only going to cement what we're already seeing, unless people use their UBI to buy luggage and bus fare.
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