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Comment by shoefly | Hacker News Reader

The small midwestern town from which I hail is rotting. The residents could never afford the luxuries flowing here in the valley. They are angry. They are huge Trump supporters. They don't want handouts. They want jobs. They want to contribute. They don't want to leave their homes. They are stuck.

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>They don't want handouts. They want jobs. They want to contribute. They don't want to leave their homes.

Well, they can't have everything. A big part of why America has historically had social and economic mobility is because it also had literal mobility; people willing to go where the work is.

What I hear when I read this is, "they want someone to come along and hand them a stable well-paying job." And who doesn't? But we live in the real world.

I think this is the main reason the Democrats got swept, and will probably continue to get swept. They aren't offering what most people want, honest pay for honest work. They are offering welfare, which most people are to proud to take, let alone want.

This isn't just a problem in the Midwest, this is a problem for almost anywhere that isn't a large city on the coast (with some exceptions). This problem affects probably 90% of our land mass and the problem has been consistently growing for the past 45 years or so.

Neither political party knows how to solve this, or if they do, don't have the political will to solve it.

That's not true at all. Clinton had plans with job retraining for coal miners. They were offering jobs. They got swept because Trump came in and said, "We'll keep coal mining," despite having no actual plan for what to do.

Yes, but coal miners are such a small subset of middle America. I'm talking about all the blood letting between VA and CA. And (I'm not being snarky) but what would you retrain them to do? Unless those cities grow an economy, they will just be retrained, still unemployed people.

Unless you have a massive migration to large cities, it's not going to do much good.

I mean think about that for a few steps. You have millions of people in small towns all over America in ghost towns. Training will help, but until these towns start growing businesses, then what? I mean read about the Walmatization of America. Read about all the factories moving to Mexico after NAFTA. It's all dead.

The Democrats used to serve the middle class, but they stopped after Carter got demolished by Reagan. Bill Clinton pushed that retrain idea, but the blood kept flowing. Why would it be any different now?

Like it or not the default vote for most of middle America is GOP. The Dems have to actually come up with something that works to get these smaller cities and towns vibrant again if they want the votes. I don't think the establishment Dems understand America outside the coastal areas.

The latest plan from Schumer is the same. Would probably do a lot of good for the working poor in cities, but won't do much for middle America. Same ole same ole. Like I said, it's a problem neither party knows how to solve, or doesn't have the political will to solve it.

Then have the migrate to the cities. Seriously, the US was founded by people moving over the Atlantic in search of better opportunities and the west was converted the same way.

50 million people? Simple dismissive answers to complex problems isn't going to solve anything.

Surely most of them have jobs? Even then, the top 5 cities could each handle a million more people - admitably it would require more infrastructure.

Also there is no rule that big problems can't have simple solutions.

Many of them are on some sort of government assistance with part time or low paying jobs. Also it would be 10 million over 5 cities. That has big problems in and of itself.

>Also there is no rule that big problems can't have simple solutions.

No, but if the solution was simple, it would have been solved already.

Yes the vast majority of the non-urban population is going to become urban for economic reasons. That’s been going on since the dawn of civilization (it's literally where the name “civilization” comes from), and it's not going to reversed any time soon.

So the solution is train 50 million people and tell them to move to large cities? Will the government pay for the move, or no? What about the skyrocketing rents in the large cities with the large influx? What about their homes and land they own now? Write it off? What exactly would you train them to do?

That's got a lot of red flags in the details. Ignoring that, it doesn't sound anywhere near ideal solution. I would expect something better. I think getting the federal government into building things again instead of contracting it out would be a start, similar to FDR's works programs. I'm sure it will get a lot of resistance, but the same way we've been doing things isn't working.

> So the solution is train 50 million people and tell them to move to large cities?

No, that's not a solution or what they need to be told to do, the move is just what is largely going to happen over time.

Insofar as there as a policy solution, it's supporting the effected population through the transition, which, certainly includes funding retraining those who can benefit from that, assisting relocation, and assisting those who can't benefit from retraining.

(While it's politically unlikely in the near term, UBI could address much of that with less friction and overhead than targeted programs.)

> I would expect something better. I think getting the federal government into building things again instead of contracting it out would be a start, similar to FDR's works programs.

Whether it's government jobs or contractor jobs makes no difference; FDRs works programs weren't significant because of that but instead because of the scale of the work. But those were to deal with a major business cycle downturn, not an effort to hold back the long-term rural→urban transition.

Unless your works program is a permanent one building monuments to waste in rural areas, it’s beside the point of the problem you are trying to address

That is an awful solution. Housing is already extremely expensive on most coasts. Adding huge amounts of people to that would make it even worse.

There are cities that aren't on the coasts.

The problem for democrats isn't their ideas or a lack of talking about jobs and economic growth, the problem is that voters instinctively sense that both parties are fungible in terms of economic outcomes regardless of what they say, so they stop critically thinking about a candidate's policy proposals and become easily swayed by bluster and demagoguery; this is a losing position for democrats because republicans are much better at these tactics and the result is the continued decline of the democratic party.

> The Democrats used to serve the middle class, but they stopped after Carter got demolished by Reagan.

No, the Democrats now serve the middle and upper class, they used to serve the working class.

And the pro-labor faction of the a party was dominant until Bill Clinton (and arguably until 1994; there's a reason why Clinton had to rely on mainly Republican votes to pass NAFTA.)

> Like it or not the default vote for most of middle America is GOP

If your default vote is for your own destruction, you will be destroyed, and then to your vote, default or otherwise, will be irrelevant. The GOP has nothing to offer Middle America but a series of people (blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, ...) to vent their anger at as a distraction while the GOP’s financiers destroy Middle America.

> The Dems have to actually come up with something that works to get these smaller cities and towns vibrant again if they want the votes.

The people can be saved; their small towns and cities, in many cases, cannot. Some might survive as shadows of themselves and living museums (see Columbia, CA, as an example from the Gold Rush), but once the economic basis for a town is gone, finding a new one is unlikely, and doing it for more than a small share of a large number is just not going to happen.

> I don't think the establishment Dems understand America outside the coastal areas.

The neoliberal establishment has been losing ground in the Democratic party for decades; and what they don't connect with has more to do with class than geography.

As a son and grandson of coal miners. That is just politician speak. My father and grandfather can't be retrained to do something else and make the same amount.

As someone who enjoys breathing clean air, they can't continue to mine coal. They just cannot. And I'm sorry they feel that way about their wages, but they have to continue to adapt.

Yup, I feel the same about cars and meat. But willing to wait for the generational change.

Coal is dead due to the economies of natural gas. Besides, China uses coal like crazy, and we pay China to do so, so as far as the atmosphere goes, the US not using coal doesn't really matter that much.

Chinese coal consumption has been declining since 2013.

They say they are working to reduce consumption, but at the same time, they are building more coal fired plants, which is projected to increase through at least 2020. They are also building plants in other countries.

http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/china-india-w...

According to Bloomberg, China’s coal-fired generation capacity may increase by as much as 19 percent over the next five years. While the country has canceled some coal-fired capacity due to lack of demand growth, China still plans to increase its coal-fired power plants to almost 1,100 gigawatts, which is three times the coal-fired capacity of the United States.

While it is true that China is building wind and solar units domestically, many of these units are being curtailed due to lack of infrastructure and a preference for coal.

Edit: The Chinese government indicates they are though, which coincides with your 2013 statistic.

https://cleantechnica.com/2017/03/14/china-coal-consumption-...

So you don't want a handout and you don't want re-training, then what do you want? For someone to wave a magic wand and make coal economically viable again?

They want honest wage for honest work. Pretty straight forward. The government sure subsidizes industry in California, New England and coastal cities, why not middle America?

So they do want handouts /subsidies then

This is remarkably tone-deaf. I also originally hailed from a small Midwestern town. The lack of available work is not a pretty sight, and suggesting that people should just uproot themselves and move somewhere else is not a solution for a number of reasons (family/friends, lack of money to move in the first place, etc). It's no small wonder that people voted for Trump - even though his promises were pretty obviously full of hot air, the opposition was (and still does) not even attempt to mask their total contempt for 'flyover country'.

You will reap what you sow.

Tone-deaf or not, you have to go where the work is. You might have to pick up a laptop and learn to code. Maybe that means uprooting your family and finding new friends. You have to make it work. To not find work is to not survive.

>You might have to pick up a laptop and learn to code.

I'm sure you can't honestly believe this will work for the vast majority of people in the US. Either you don't value your trade, or you are simply unwilling to seriously discuss the issue.

Historically, that happened before.

There was large amounts of net migration in the late 19th century - early 20th century from rural areas (where work increasingly wasn't due to agriculture automation) to urban areas. [1]

As farms automated, it was often "flyover territories" that took the lead in creating the then-new high school movement. [2]

Heck, for technologies that were increasingly becoming indispensable to life, there was even strong government efforts to make sure access was available for that. (EG in 1936: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act)

So, "pick up a laptop and learn to code" is an acceptable answer to me. Of course, actually, there are a lot of other careers besides coding. The issue is that increasingly, former career paths like resource extraction and manufacturing are either getting automated away, or are getting shoved out by globalization. This leaves the service industry (including the knowledge economy). Your "standard" service job doesn't pay very good these days, and the current "career path" in America to obtain a good knowledge economy job is through a college degree (I know, not the best "signal" in many ways, but for now it is the signal) and rural participation rate is very low [3].

One frustration with the current political scene, which is so dominated by culture war anger, is that these concepts don't even really get aired. How to improve rural higher education, how to aid career transitions from manufacturing, how to improved wage standards for service workers (which are increasingly replacing manufacturing jobs), or even something like rural Internet initiatives? Seems far more interesting to discuss than what often passes for "political news" these days.

[1] https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-us-history/period-... [2] https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2624456/Goldin_E... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/09/the-ru...

>Historically, that happened before.

Yes, but the population was a lot smaller. Also they had jobs to go to. Even in coastal states, good entry level jobs are hard to come by, even with a college education.

Here's a population by state.

http://worldpopulationreview.com/states/

Think about getting everyone outside of a coastal state to move to a coastal state. What would that do to existing jobs in the coastal states? What would that do to land values in the coastal states? What would that do to land values in the non-coastal states? Think those people would be able to sell their old houses?

I mean "train and move," isn't really a solution. It makes a good sound bite, but once you think about the details, it kinda falls down when you are talking what? 50 million people?

We don't need more people churning out more webshit. Some of us actually give a shit about wanting to better our local communities instead of running off to SV or NYC to build Tinder for Dogs.

You don't have to run there. If you wanted to better your local community, you'd be working to better opportunities there, instead of decrying the idea that the economy is changing.

I am. You'll notice I am not the one advocating people just moving to chase ephemeral opportunities.

It's not tone deaf. It's tone deaf to not recognize that what these people want is a handout of it's own sort. They want to do the same stuff that they've been doing for the last 50 years. And it sucks for them, but that's just not feasible anymore. Jobs retraining programs have been available, but that's not what they want. They want the economy of the 50s, where they were able to do the same factory job for 30 years.

I don't disagree that the old timers want the old economy, but if they've been working that system their entire lives that's not exactly surprising. The younger folks, on the other hand, most of them just want something that provides a livable wage. I don't know how to fix that problem, but it's a problem, and every time I hear "lol move to the coasts there's jobs" it just tells me that whoever is saying that has some combination of lack of understanding that not all people are okay with abandoning their family (e.g. older relatives that may rely on them or they otherwise want to spend time with), that they can't afford that move in the first place, or otherwise have any true interest in even considering the problem at more than a superficial level.

I hear that, and for the record, I don't support everyone moving to the coasts either.

That attitude is completely irrational.

What is the difference between the government creating jobs for which there is no market, and the government handing you a check to make ends meet?

Its also similar to "farmer palmer" attitude in Viz "get of moi land" and you don't get that stereotype (farmers living of the CAP subsidies) without some truth.

Flyover country has nothing but contempt for coastal liberal elites. To the point where they make up bullshit about how much contempt we have for them and whine about being "flyover country".

At least we have the money.

Valuable comment - because both sides of the spectrum miss something in there. It cost the democrats the election not to understand that these people wanted jobs, not welfare, and the reason they won't get jobs is that they won't go where the jobs are.

> They want jobs. They want to contribute. They don't want to leave their homes. They are stuck.

Government should subsidize relocation to a full time job.

Well they should pull themselves up by the bootstraps like good little republicans.

On my team of 8 people 1 grew up anywhere near the Seattle area. Half the team moved to the US from other countries. Maybe these people should move. It sucks, but life isn't fair and sometimes you have to sacrifice what you want for what you actually need.

The big problem is that they do want handouts; just of a different kind. Jobs retraining programs have been around for quite a while; they were central to Clinton's plan for what to do with people who used to work in coal mines. But they don't want to stop mining coal, no matter how shitty it is for everyone involved (the miners themselves, the environment, those who live near coal plants, etc). They want to keep the coal mining jobs. They want... a handout.

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