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You're not getting it. The people there have to develop their own opportunities. An hourly job at Dollar General is not going to get anyone out of poverty.
What is first needed is virtue among the people. Work ethic is lacking. It's lacking largely because it hasn't been necessary for generations. They have been enabled. You have generations of men (yes, I primarily blame the men) who have been able to get by without working and producing children out of wedlock with no accountability.
Time for some tough love. Cut off the spigot and force some accountability. If you don't work, you don't eat. Will it take time? Yes, it might take a generation or two. But what you're going to build eventually is a community of stable nuclear families with good work ethic.
Family is the key. Broken families (absent fathers in particular) is the #1 contributor to generational poverty.
Everything you've written is just a bunch of fact-free nonsense.
If you want to look at the issue of rural poverty in this state, look no further than the disappearance of rural jobs. Since 2000 rural counties in Alabama have been absolutely brutalized by declines in industries that once constituted solid, working-class jobs. The numbers are shocking.
Agriculture, silvaculture, fishing, and hunting: 66% decline.
Mining: 50% decline.
Manufacturing: 30%. And the traditionally more rural industries such as textiles (73% decline) and pulp and paper (59% decline) have been hit hardest.
Trucking: 20% decline
Electrical utilities: 13% decline.
And the list goes on and on. As a result, while places such as Birmingham and Huntsville and Auburn, et al, are doing well in terms of job creation, rural counties have been a complete train wreck since 2000. Here are the total declines in employment in just a sampling of counties from 2000 until today:
Barbour County: 50% decline
Russell County: 10% decline (With a 25% decline from 2000-2010 when Russell Athletics suddenly moved it all overseas)
Wilcox County: 38%
Winston County: 23%
Talladega County: 17%
Walker County: 20%
And the list goes on and on. In fact, you can pretty much trace this decline in employment to China's inclusion in the WTO (NAFTA didn't exactly help either). As result, with the exception of a county here and there lucky enough to land a small auto parts plant and hold its own, rural counties have been absolutely bled dry in terms of jobs. This is not supposition. It is statistical fact, courtesy of the St. Louis Federal Reserve.
And it didn't happen because there was some sudden moral failing, which is about the most vacuous thing I've read today. The only moral failing at work here was the economic policy in this country on the part of Republican and Democrats alike that practically sent an engraved invitation to American industry to take those jobs overseas.
In most smaller towns across the state of Alabama, there used to be a plant, a mill, a mine, a sawmill, or some other enterprise delivering decent paying jobs. What's more, those were often the best-paying jobs outside of the local supervisor, the school principal, or the town doctor.
But with the hemorrhaging of those jobs overseas (Or in the case of coal miners in Walker County, electric generating plants switching to natural gas as a consequence of the fracking boom), these guys who had spent their years in the mine, the assembly line, or wherever, suddenly got the pink slip. Heck, I remember when Russell Athletics abandoned Alex City to go to wherever. 5,000 jobs lost within a year in a county with a population of 48,000 at the time. 20% of the jobs. And the ripple effect on the rest of the economy was awful. Suddenly there's not enough money to fund the schools. Or social services. Or anything else. Do you not understand this?
As far as the idiotic suggestion that "Well, they should just pack up and leave," the next question is "How?" Abandon your house? Be the 21st Century equivalent of an Okie? Throw the wife and kids into the car and drive....where?
Because the decline of manufacturing jobs in this country isn't just limited to Alabama. If your career has been spent on an assembly line or sawing logs or whatever, guess what? Those jobs aren't anywhere else, either.
And how far do you go before you run out of what little money you had? My daughter just landed a new job that entailed a move back to Birmingham. Just the cost to rent a middling one-bedroom apartment, once we ponied up for deposits, electrical hookup, and a truck was around $2,000. And that's just the first month. Now imagine doing that before you even have a job in hand. Even worse, imagine having to do the same thing with a wife and a couple of kids.
Then what? Whatcha going to do with a bunch of non-transferable skills? An experienced coal miner was pulling down close to $80,000 a year before he lost his job. The average assistant retail manager averages around $45,000. So not only does your cost of living go through the roof, wiping out whatever savings you had managed to accrue, but you also aren't making nearly as much money as before the place got shuttered.
And that's even before fulfilling the education needs of whatever job you can get. Yeah, people are hiring in the trades. But if your skills weren't transferable from whatever you did before, then you have to get yourself to a community college. That's a year or two to get a certification to be a welder or some such. All while you still have to feed the kids, pay the rent, and God knows what else.
Oh, and even you manage to jump through all those hoops, if you're over the age of forty-five, good freaking luck.
That's the economic trap these people are in. And the very large portion of their pickle has to do with economic forces far beyond their control. And blithely telling them to "make their own opportunity" is about the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Because even if some laid-off blue collar guy in Colbert County manages to cobble together a business and start knocking on doors, who on earth is going to have the money to buy from him? I drive through these towns. Lots of vacant storefronts for a really good reason. And it's not because of a collective lack of initiative.
I know what's coming next, the smug counterargument that, "Well, hey, I did okay." Well, I did, too. My parents were dead broke in a terrible economy. So I managed to put together some scholarships, some grants, and managed to earn my four-year degree while working a full-time job. And I walked off the stage with my diploma and not a dime in student debt.
But I'm not so arrogant to think that could be duplicated by some poor guy out in the sticks. For starters, I had a decent secondary education at a reasonably well-funded school system in a metro area. Second, I didn't have to move somewhere to snag what opportunities I could. And, third, I could tap into a support system of family and friends in my area when I started looking for my first job out of college. However, for every heartwarming Ragged Dick story you hear about some guy who bootstrapped their way out of poverty, remember there are a lot of people who couldn't manage it. And it wasn't due to a character flaw either. It was due to the game rigged against them from the get go.
Which leads me to my last point. I challenge you to walk into a UMW hall or an unemployment office in some rural county or any number of other place like that. Walk up to some men who have worked every damned day of their lives, attended church faithfully, and done everything in their power to desperately shore up their sinking fortunes. Or a guy who put his life on the line for you with two tours in Iraq or Afghanistan, and now has post-traumatic stress disorder, just like 25% of the guys who came home from the Middle East. Lots of those out there, too.
Simper your way up to them with your weird and lazy culture war crap and lecture them how their inability to now make ends meet is due to their moral failing.
In fact, let me know the time and the place you do it. I'll be ready with a video camera to capture the results.
Last edited by MinivanDriver; 09-17-2021 at 03:29 PM..
Everything you've written is just a bunch of fact-free nonsense.
If you want to look at the issue of rural poverty in this state, look no further than the disappearance of rural jobs. Since 2000 rural counties in Alabama have been absolutely brutalized by declines in industries that once constituted solid, working-class jobs. The numbers are shocking. <<snipped for length>>>
It's true that the vast majority of economic woes in the USA can be blamed on bad policy at the Federal level. But this thread is specifically about poverty in rural Alabama.
Your post seems to imply that the economy was booming in rural Alabama prior to the 90s or 2001. That's nonsense. Rural Alabama has been dirt poor ever since the Civil War. Even if there was a class of people who made decent income in rural Alabama prior to NAFTA or manufacturing's mass exodus to China; the fact remains that there was also a class of people in rural Alabama who were just as shiftless as today. Those coal miners, mill workers, etc who lost their jobs in the 90s or 2000s moved elsewhere and kept working, or they stayed put and did something else. The shiftless sorts stayed behind and are still perpetuating the same lifestyle they always have.
Everything you've written is just a bunch of fact-free nonsense.
If you want to look at the issue of rural poverty in this state, look no further than the disappearance of rural jobs. Since 2000 rural counties in Alabama have been absolutely brutalized by declines in industries that once constituted solid, working-class jobs. The numbers are shocking.
Agriculture, silvaculture, fishing, and hunting: 66% decline.
Mining: 50% decline.
Manufacturing: 30%. And the traditionally more rural industries such as textiles (73% decline) and pulp and paper (59% decline) have been hit hardest.
Trucking: 20% decline
Electrical utilities: 13% decline.
And the list goes on and on. As a result, while places such as Birmingham and Huntsville and Auburn, et al, are doing well in terms of job creation, rural counties have been a complete train wreck since 2000. Here are the total declines in employment in just a sampling of counties from 2000 until today:
Barbour County: 50% decline
Russell County: 10% decline (With a 25% decline from 2000-2010 when Russell Athletics suddenly moved it all overseas)
Wilcox County: 38%
Winston County: 23%
Talladega County: 17%
Walker County: 20%
And the list goes on and on. In fact, you can pretty much trace this decline in employment to China's inclusion in the WTO (NAFTA didn't exactly help either). As result, with the exception of a county here and there lucky enough to land a small auto parts plant and hold its own, rural counties have been absolutely bled dry in terms of jobs. This is not supposition. It is statistical fact, courtesy of the St. Louis Federal Reserve.
And it didn't happen because there was some sudden moral failing, which is about the most vacuous thing I've read today. The only moral failing at work here was the economic policy in this country on the part of Republican and Democrats alike that practically sent an engraved invitation to American industry to take those jobs overseas.
In most smaller towns across the state of Alabama, there used to be a plant, a mill, a mine, a sawmill, or some other enterprise delivering decent paying jobs. What's more, those were often the best-paying jobs outside of the local supervisor, the school principal, or the town doctor.
But with the hemorrhaging of those jobs overseas (Or in the case of coal miners in Walker County, electric generating plants switching to natural gas as a consequence of the fracking boom), these guys who had spent their years in the mine, the assembly line, or wherever, suddenly got the pink slip. Heck, I remember when Russell Athletics abandoned Alex City to go to wherever. 5,000 jobs lost within a year in a county with a population of 48,000 at the time.
As far as the idiotic suggestion that "Well, they should just pack up and leave," the next question is "How?" Abandon your house? Be the 21st Century equivalent of an Okie? Throw the wife and kids into the car and drive....where?
Because the decline of manufacturing jobs in this country isn't just limited to Alabama. If your career has been spent on an assembly line or sawing logs or whatever, guess what? Those jobs aren't anywhere else, either.
And how far do you go before you run out of what little money you had? My daughter just landed a new job that entailed a move back to Birmingham. Just the cost to rent a middling one-bedroom apartment, once we ponied up for deposits, electrical hookup, and a truck was around $2,000. And that's just the first month, before there's even have a job in hand. Now imagine having to do the same thing with a wife and a couple of kids.
Then what? Whatcha going to do with a bunch of non-transferable skills? An experienced coal miner was pulling down close to $80,000 a year before he lost his job. The average assistant retail manager averages around $45,000. So not only does your cost of living go through the roof, wiping out whatever savings you had managed to accrue, but you also aren't making nearly as much money as before the place got shuttered.
And that's even before fulfilling the education needs of whatever job you can get. Yeah, people are hiring in the trades. But if your skills weren't transferable from whatever you did before, then you have to get yourself to a community college. That's a year or two to get a certification to be a welder or some such. All while you still have to feed the kids, pay the rent, and God knows what else.
Oh, and even you manage to jump through all those hoops, if you're over the age of forty-five, good freaking luck.
That's the economic trap these people are in. And the very large portion of their pickle has to do with economic forces far beyond their control. And blithely telling them to "make their own opportunity" is about the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Because even if some laid-off blue collar guy in Colbert County manages to cobble together a business and start knocking on doors, who on earth is going to have the money to buy from him?
I know what's coming next, the smug counterargument that, "Well, hey, I did okay." Well, I did, too. My parents were dead broke in a terrible economy. So I managed to put together some scholarships, some grants, and managed to earn my four-year degree while working a full-time job. And I walked off the stage with my diploma and not a dime in student debt.
But I'm not so arrogant to think that could be duplicated by some poor guy out in the sticks. For starters, I had a decent secondary education at a reasonably well-funded school system. Second, I didn't have to move somewhere to snag what opportunities I could. And, third, I could tap into a support system of family and friends in my area when I started looking for my first job out of college. However, for every heartwarming Ragged Dick story you hear about some guy who bootstrapped their way out of poverty, remember there are a lot of people who couldn't manage it. And it wasn't due to a characdter flaw either. It was due to the game rigged against them from the get go.
Which leads me to my last point. I challenge you to walk into a UMW hall or an unemployment office in some rural county or any number of other place like that. Walk up to some men who have worked every damned day of their lives, attended church faithfully, and done everything in their power to desperately shore up their sinking fortunes. Or a guy who put his life on the line for you with two tours in Iraq or Afghanistan, and now has post-traumatic stress disorder, just like 25% of the guys who came home from the Middle East. Lots of those out there, too.
Simper your way up to them with your weird and lazy social warrior crap and lecture them how their unemployment is due to their moral failing.
In fact, let me know the time and the place you do it. I'll be ready with a video camera to capture the results.
Good analysis.
Still, what would solve the poverty? What kind of policy, assistance, retraining? What is your Rep doing about it? Why is it not happening?
It's true that the vast majority of economic woes in the USA can be blamed on bad policy at the Federal level. But this thread is specifically about poverty in rural Alabama.
Your post seems to imply that the economy was booming in rural Alabama prior to the 90s or 2001. That's nonsense. Rural Alabama has been dirt poor ever since the Civil War. Even if there was a class of people who made decent income in rural Alabama prior to NAFTA or manufacturing's mass exodus to China; the fact remains that there was also a class of people in rural Alabama who were just as shiftless as today. Those coal miners, mill workers, etc who lost their jobs in the 90s or 2000s moved elsewhere and kept working, or they stayed put and did something else. The shiftless sorts stayed behind and are still perpetuating the same lifestyle they always have.
I didn't say that at all. That's sheer dishonesty on your part. However, the disappearance of what jobs there were is statistical fact, one you simply can't argue with.
I didn't say that at all. That's sheer dishonesty on your part. However, the disappearance of what jobs there were is statistical fact, one you simply can't argue with.
Okay, fair enough. I'm not being dishonest. I must be misunderstanding you.
I still stand by my point. I concede that rural Alabama used to have a working class and a shiftless class. We can say that since the 90s/00s the working class has largely dried up or moved away. The shiftless class remains. How do we fix that? I refer you back to my previous posts.
I think your post is built on a faulty premise. Your post strongly implied that rural Alabama didn't used to be poor. That's factually incorrect.
More dishonesty from you. I didn't imply that at all. The only actual dollar amount I used was that of coal miner pay, which is well documented, thanks. What I did imply was that there are a lot more jobs in 2000 than there are today. And a blue-collar job back then paid a lot better than no job today.
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