Americans really, really don't understand what poverty is, why it exists, and how it works. Nor do they comprehend why it must be fought and how hard it is to fight. This is because most Americans haven't been face-to-face with actual poverty in 50 years and now that it's creeping up on them in the less fortunate reaches of the country, they don't know what is going on.

The stores in these towns are dying because people don't have money to spend in them, and because the stores are dying, people have even less money and more stores have to close. It's a self-accelerating process. Even McDonald's is not immune: it's still unaffordable for the truly poor, so as people slide, its revenues are going to decline like everything else. Conservatives believe poverty is a "moral medicine" that toughens up the good and kills off the weak. Wrong. It's a cancer.

For a more ground-level analysis of this, what actually happens during corporate-chain hiring drives is that the individual stores have tight seatbelts and the budgets often don't increase. The corporate office may decide to have a "hiring drive" but it doesn't increase the stores' budgets. The goal of the "hiring drive" is not to increase staffing but to take in new people and fire some, or to ensure that workers who are currently getting overtime no longer do. (Workers in low-paid hourly positions often love overtime, but managers don't like having to pay it out.) Thus, hiring new people means that those are there have to take hours cuts or get laid off. Generally, managers would rather keep the people they have than hire someone new and have to cut other peoples' hours, hurting morale across the board. So the incentive structure in such hiring drives is such that very little actual hiring will take place. Serious hiring only happens if (a) the budget increases, or (b) people are working overtime and corporate comes down on the store manager for paying out too much time-and-a-half.