"Rural folk" are going to need to come to grips with their exorbitantly subsidized lifestyle choices sooner or later. Probably sooner, since their guy is sabotaging one of their most important subsidies (near-free rural mail service) as we speak.
In Washington state they have a report from the legislature that has spending in each county compared to tax revenues. This is very sensitive because of course Seattle money goes out to the whole state. There's a second version of that report that tries to compute the economic benefit of the rural areas, separately from the actual tax revenues, I'm sure this was created to lessen the sting.
I want to keep our economy and the people in it living. But we need to have a shared reality.
One county, Lake County, had the good manners to cancel a planned vote of secession in late 2015 after the rest of the state paid to put out an enormous wildfire there.
rural folk think the same way of Urbanites as you think of them. they think everyone should get out of the cities and stop being a polluting leech who is detached from the natural state of humans living in equillibrium with nature.