Armpits, White Ghettos and Contempt - Who really despises the American heartland? By Paul Krugman

[applegrove]

Last edited Fri Apr 26, 2019, 04:02 AM - Edit history (1)

Armpits, White Ghettos and Contempt

Who really despises the American heartland?

By Paul Krugman at the N.Y. Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/opinion/midwest-economy.html?fallback=0&recId=1KOWuEu6a2XlaXzn6bdx3GBlahi&locked=0&geoContinent=NA&geoRegion=ON&recAlloc=top_conversion&geoCountry=CA&blockId=most-popular&imp_id=549983695&action=click&module=Most Popular&pgtype=Homepage

"SNIP......

Many conservatives, however, blame the victims. They attribute the heartland’s woes to a mysterious collapse in morality and family values that somehow hasn’t affected coastal cities. Moral collapse is the theme of books like Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America,” and of innumerable articles. One widely read essay in National Review went so far as to label the troubled Eastern Heartland “the white ghetto,” whose people are too indolent to move to where the jobs are.

So who, exactly, doesn’t respect middle America?

When it comes to politicians, of course, what they say is much less important than what they do. So what do the policy choices of liberal and conservative pols say about how they value the heartland?

Some Democrats, notably Elizabeth Warren, have been offering real proposals to help rural areas. They’re probably not enough to reverse rural and small-town economic decline, which would be hard to do even with plenty of money and the best will in the world. But they would help.

Meanwhile, all that Republicans have to offer are fantasies about bringing back lost jobs in things like coal mining and manufacturing. In reality, coal mine closures have continued and the manufacturing trade deficit has widened since Trump took office.

......SNIP"

[SunSeeker]

1. K & R

[benfranklin1776]

2. Krugman is right

But we have to call out the Rethugs directly for this and so as Howard Dean once did ask the question “you’ve been voting for republican for 40 years and what’s it gotten you?” And state plainly we have a better way to help you and your communities achieve the seemingly lost American dream. As Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson did before.

[Blue_Tires]

3. Epic kick!

[SharonClark]

4. Well, according to the "brilliant" and "insightful" Tweety last night, it's the Dems.

I guess he never reads Krugman who is actually brilliant and insightful.

[dalton99a]

5. "Contempt for middle America is much more prevalent on the right than on the left"

More important, think about what will happen to troubled parts of America if Republicans manage to do what they tried to do in 2017, and impose savage cuts on Medicaid and other safety net programs.

I always think about West Virginia, where Medicaid covers almost a third of the nonelderly population. And it’s not just about receiving care, it’s also about jobs. More than 16 percent of West Virginians are employed in health care and social assistance, compared with less than 3 percent in mining. Hospitals are the biggest employers in many parts of rural America. What do you think will happen to those jobs if Medicaid is hollowed out?

The point is that if you look at what conservatives say to each other, as opposed to what they pretend to believe, it becomes clear that contempt for middle America is much more prevalent on the right than on the left. And this contempt is reflected in the right’s policy agenda, which would badly hurt the people it claims to consider the only real Americans.

I know that this will be a hard point to get across. Indeed, I’m sure that some people in the heartland will take any effort to convince them that they’re being misled as just another example of liberal disrespect. But all Americans, wherever they live, deserve to be told the truth.

[Wounded Bear]

6. Watch what they do, don't believe what they say...

Good advice for anybody about any politician.