NYT article on the appeal of the President in rural Arkansas

[MillCreek]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/opinion/sunday/trump-arkansas.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage#commentsContainer

An interesting article. Both my parents were born and raised in NW Arkansas and left in 1950 to come to Seattle. 

[RocketMan]

The writer's contempt for the people and the area is evident.  He brought out every tired cliché that exists about rural folks, their lifestyles and beliefs.  That makes it difficult to take his article seriously.

[Ben]

The writer's contempt for the people and the area is evident.  He brought out every tired cliché that exists about rural folks, their lifestyles and beliefs.  That makes it difficult to take his article seriously.

They're on a roll with the "deplorable flyover" stuff. Another editor wrote an opinion piece where he "interviewed an imaginary Trump supporter from flyover country." In other words, what an NYC dweller thinks one is. Far be it for a newspaper to say, actually interview a real live deplorable, versus the imaginary, toothless, third grade dropout caricatures they make up at their wine and cheese parties.

[MechAg94]

Just in the first part, why would a rural county need to hire a person with a master's degree to run the library?  And why would anyone think that was a good argument for higher pay?  I have no idea what the people make who run the library in my home town.  It was also the county seat.  

And looking at the picture, that is a bigger library on a lot more property than the little one in my home town.  They might be paying more than he says the librarian makes just in grounds maintenance.  What a waste. 

And IMO the story really is about the previous elected officials who went on a spending spree when tax revenue was higher, but didn't pay for it up front. 

[MechAg94]

You can skip down to the last few paragraphs to see the author's attitude.  She seems to have trouble grasping why anyone would be against spending more tax dollars on govt handouts and services.  She acts as if that is some sort of revelation that no one ever thought of before.

And a quick scan of some of the comments shows a lot of the more left-leaning readers seem to think the rural people are hateful because they don't want to give the librarian a raise.  It isn't hate or really anything personal.  They just understand that if the county spends more money, it is their property taxes going up the next year to cover it.  And if you give an inch to the govt, they tend to take a mile in the end.

[Hawkmoon]

There’s a prevailing sense of scarcity — it’s easy for people who have lived much of their lives in a place where $25 an hour seems like a high salary to believe there just isn’t enough money to go around. The government, here and elsewhere, just can’t afford to help anyone, people told me. The attitude extends to national issues, like immigration. Ms. Hamilton told me she’d witnessed, in Texas, a hospital being practically bankrupted by the cost of caring for immigrants and said, “I don’t want my tax dollars to be used to pay for people that are coming here just to sit on a government ticket.” Mr. Widener, who described himself as “more libertarian” than anything else, told me his heart goes out to migrant children who are held in detention centers at the border, but he blames the parents who brought them to this country.

Where I see needless cruelty, my neighbors see necessary reality.

I have an extremely difficult time understanding where the author is coming from on this. Who is to blame for the illegal immigrant children of illegal immigrant adults being detained other than the illegal immigrant adults who brought them [the children] here?

[cordex]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/opinion/trump-voters.html
Another good interview from the NYT with one of those deplorable Flyover Scum.

[lee n. field]

Just in the first part, why would a rural county need to hire a person with a master's degree to run the library?

An MLS.  Master in Library Science.   Think of it as a couple years post BS or BA to learn to be a librarian.

(I used to work in the U of IL library, which was also host to their library school, which I think is the oldest library science program in this country.  I saw a lot of these folks as they cycled through.)

And looking at the picture, that is a bigger library on a lot more property than the little one in my home town.  They might be paying more than he says the librarian makes just in grounds maintenance.  What a waste.

Building reminds me of what our little city did 15-20 years ago.  Built up a nice building, which also houses meeting venues and a cafe and such like, and let the old Carnigie library sit empty.  (Empty, until the city hall building broke and had to be abandoned, and they all ended up in the old library.)

[MechAg94]

Thinking about it, my home town library might be the same size, but there isn't much outside of it but sidewalks.  It is in the middle of town.  It was also not new when I was a kid. 

Librarian wouldn't be one of those great jobs, but there are quite a few libraries in this country and that pay is higher than many English and Literature graduates or so we hear. 

[brimic]

What’s also true, though, is that many here seem determined to get rid of the last institutions trying to help them, to keep people with educations out, and to retreat from community life and concentrate on taking care of themselves and their own families. It’s an attitude that is against taxes, immigrants and government, but also against helping your neighbor.

They probably have families that go back 200+ years in the area and did just fine without the involvement of government.
The bolded part is a strawman attack. The left believes that 'taxing and controlling one person and giving the confiscated money to someone else is the equivalent to "helping your neighbor."

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The same kind of crap is happing in the town I grew up in: population is now just over 1000, it was about 1200 when I was a kid.
They just doubled the size of the public school- building another gym, spenind 2 million on the project. The entire HS enrollment is around 100, it was never over 140 or so when I was in HS.
They just built a new library- tore down the old one (which was built when I was a kid), and spent over a million on a new one.
How any of this is ever going to be paid for is beyond me.

[Boomhauer]

They hate it when us stupid hicks don’t want higher taxes because we know the revenue will all go straight to politician’s pockets and pet projects instead of what the increased taxes were lobbied for, not to mention we don’t want increased taxes because the amount taken from our paychecks and the amounts we have to pay for property taxes are all too damn high already

We aren’t stupid. We see the amounts taken and yet the schools are still *expletive deleted*it, the roads are still *expletive deleted*it, public buildings and facilities are still *expletive deleted*it, and government functions, especially the courts are still *expletive deleted*it (wtf good is calling the police for something when the offender is going to get a slap on the wrist at best?!) People are tired of the ever screeching for higher taxes but the situation never changing. A good example is my home county blew money for their school maintenance and improvement for decades and now wants to raise property taxes by 30% to build a $100 mil high school.

[brimic]

A good example is my home county blew money for their school maintenance and improvement for decades and now wants to raise property taxes by 30% to build a $100 mil high school.

$120 million was the referendum in the previous county I lived in- and this was with declining enrollment. The school district I was in wanted to build 2 new high schools- they are actually the same building and site, just East and West school designations. Too many of the people in the district didn't want a combined school, because it would mean less opportunity for their little Johnnie or little Suzie to join a sportsball team. So we got 2 new schools on the same site, with twice the administration, twice the sportsball courts and fields, etc. My property taxes were projected to go up by about $1000.
I'm so very happy to have moved out of that school district shortly after it passed.

[MechAg94]

Here a lot of those new construction projects get put for bond elections.  Too many people vote them in despite the fact that property taxes will be used to pay off the bonds.  Then they wonder why their property taxes go up later.

[MillCreek]

I often wonder where is the outcry regarding higher Federal taxes to pay for corporate welfare, farm subsidies or the military?  I don't use any of that, so why should I have to pay for it? Cause 'Murica, I guess.  I wonder if it is because of the increasing state and Federal tax burden that people are much more aware of the local sales and property taxes and bond issues, and they feel they have more control over those purse strings.  Every year at tax time, I add up our state, Federal and local tax dollars collected from us, and I just shudder at the total: well into the five figures, and that does not even count Social Security.  Almost 70% of our county general fund budget ( $ 283 million) goes to the courts and law enforcement.  I personally have never had to use the sheriff's office other than to renew my concealed permit every four years.

[brimic]

 I personally have never had to use the sheriff's office other than to renew my concealed permit every four years.

A sheriff's deputy showed up at my house last week wednesday morning when my wife called 911 after falling down the basement stairs, and broke her leg and dislocated her ankle. SHe was in horrible pain and hung up because she had a hard time talking to the 911 operator. The deputy called an ambulance for her. I am very grateful for all of that.

If there is any level of government that I support, it is the local Sheriff's department.

[Ben]

While I've generally aligned with my understanding of rural culture, I've not really understood it until I moved here.

We have a dinky little library here, and I think the librarian is part time and paid little. Yet she works like someone making $100K/yr at a big city library, constantly promoting the library, especially with kids. Lots of volunteers and people who give what they can. I've already donated a box of books myself. Also, tangentially, I'm also looking more at giving my charitable contributions at a more local level, vs always sending my dough to the Salvation Army. I wouldn't do that in previous places, because it always seemed the money went to addicts and losers. Here it looks like it would truly go to community improvements and people who could really use a helping hand.

On taxing, the county has an extremely overcrowded jail, much caused by the ridiculous amount of population growth in the two large cities in the county. Yet a ballot measure to fund a new jail via property tax has failed four times now. People here, especially outside of the cities, take every dollar of their property tax seriously. While they don't want criminals roaming around, they just can't see the solution being a newer, bigger jail, especially when it will be geared towards a couple of cities, versus the county in general.

[cordex]

I often wonder where is the outcry regarding higher Federal taxes to pay for corporate welfare, farm subsidies or the military?  I don't use any of that, so why should I have to pay for it? Cause 'Murica, I guess.  I wonder if it is because of the increasing state and Federal tax burden that people are much more aware of the local sales and property taxes and bond issues, and they feel they have more control over those purse strings.  Every year at tax time, I add up our state, Federal and local tax dollars collected from us, and I just shudder at the total: well into the five figures, and that does not even count Social Security. 

In your own smugly sarcastic way I think you're right about a lot of that.  People know they don't have any impact on the Feds, but they might be able to have some say in a local vote.

Almost 70% of our county general fund budget ( $ 283 million) goes to the courts and law enforcement.  I personally have never had to use the sheriff's office other than to renew my concealed permit every four years.

Yeah, but what is your county budget actually responsible for?

My state spends more than 1/3rd of its budget on education, and that is leaving out local referendums and so forth.  I do use those services and even in the "good" public schools my kids attend I'm appalled at the quality of education.

[Hawkmoon]

We have a dinky little library here, and I think the librarian is part time and paid little. Yet she works like someone making $100K/yr at a big city library, constantly promoting the library, especially with kids. Lots of volunteers and people who give what they can. I've already donated a box of books myself. Also, tangentially, I'm also looking more at giving my charitable contributions at a more local level, vs always sending my dough to the Salvation Army. I wouldn't do that in previous places, because it always seemed the money went to addicts and losers. Here it looks like it would truly go to community improvements and people who could really use a helping hand.

But the article says rural people don't even want to help their neighbors, or themselves:

The library fight was, itself, a fight over the future of rural America, what it meant to choose to live in a county like mine, what my neighbors were willing to do for one another, what they were willing to sacrifice to foster a sense of community here.

The answer was, for the most part, not very much.

And yet, in times of crisis, it's usually the people from rural communities who are most likely to step up and help out, however they can. So, to translate, what the author views as "[being] willing to do for one another" isn't really about doing anything to help one another -- it's about being willing to fork over ever-increasing amounts of money to a faceless bureaucratic system and trust that the system will magically transform all that money into help for yourselves and your neighbors. This author is a person who doesn't understand the first thing about "helping" if/when the help might include actually doing something, or getting her pretty hands dirty. To her, "helping" is all about feeding the system.

A considerable part of rural America is shrinking, and, for some, this means it’s time to go into retreat. Rather than pitching in to maintain what they have, people are willing to go it alone, to devote all their resources to their own homes and their own families.

Curiously, she writes as if taking care of your own home and your own family is a bad thing.  


Example of how out of touch with reality some (many) liberals are: I live in a bedroom community that was definitely  a rural, farming community when my parents moved us back onto a corner of the family farm in 1950. In the ensuing decades, we watched as one farmer after another sold out to developers, who built successively larger (and uglier) McMansions for the doctors, lawyers, and professors who plied their respective professions in the nearby city. When I was a kid, if we wanted to play softball we hopped on our bikes and peddled over to Tommie Adams' house, because he had the largest, most level yard where we could mark out the base lines. That wasn't acceptable to the newcomers -- they "needed" to have little league, professionally maintained ball fields, pitching machines, batting cages, and all the expensive paraphernalia that costs money. Then they kvetched if the taxes went up, so the money got spent on ball fields and tennis courts, while the roads didn't get maintained and the leaking roof on the school didn't get replaced.

Our high school is a regional school, drawing from my town, the town to our north, and the town to our south. School population has been declining. The budget for our share of the regional high school sucks up probably about a third of the total tax burden for my town. Several years ago, the regional school district proposed a new budget with a significant increase -- even though (once again) the enrollment numbers were down and were projected to continue to decrease. Because it's regional, the high school budget is voted on at a referendum that's conducted separately from the budget referenda for the towns themselves. To the surprise of many, the high school budget proposal was rejected, by a rather significant margin.

So the school board sharpened their pencils and came back with a new proposal -- asking for MORE money than they had asked initially. This proposal was also shot down at referendum. So they crunched the numbers, and came back asking for less than their second proposal, but still more than the original proposal. The members of the school board acted genuinely confused when their third proposal was also soundly defeated at the referendum.

This went on for about three or four months! We went through, IIRC, FOURTEEN referenda before the school board finally submitted a budget proposal that was somewhat aligned with the realities of the economy and the projected enrollment numbers. The school board just couldn't wrap their heads around the notion that people weren't willing to increase spending when the student population was dwindling.

[brimic]

Re: helping one another...

There was a fecesbook post from my hometown this last spring when the river flooded over its banks (as it does regularly in the spring).
There are a lot of shop owners in town that come from major cities and open boutiques that are incongruent with the character of the town and its economy.
The city yard had posted that they had sand and bags available for anyone who needed them. There were people posting about offering help for filling and hauling sandbags to people along the river in need.
The local bank had their own supply of sandbags shipped in and had a pretty impressive dam built around it by an outside contractor.
One of the local shopowners complained about the bank getting special treatment () and that the city wasn't doing enough to help and serve the people who live or have shops along the river... she was expecting that the city provide a service for her that the bank paid for on its own.
She got rightfully excoriated by the local residents on the page.

[MechAg94]

In your own smugly sarcastic way I think you're right about a lot of that.  People know they don't have any impact on the Feds, but they might be able to have some say in a local vote.
 
Yeah, but what is your county budget actually responsible for?

My state spends more than 1/3rd of its budget on education, and that is leaving out local referendums and so forth.  I do use those services and even in the "good" public schools my kids attend I'm appalled at the quality of education.

The bold is one of the reasons I think most of the things the Feds and even the states do should be done at the very local level (even education).  The only way to keep that stuff halfway efficient is to collect the taxes and spend it all in the same area where the people voting for the spending will see the tax bill directly and know exactly what they are paying for and who is in charge of it.

[Perd Hapley]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/opinion/sunday/trump-arkansas.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage#commentsContainer

An interesting article. Both my parents were born and raised in NW Arkansas and left in 1950 to come to Seattle. 

It is not an interesting article.

The author seems to think the primary way of caring about your community is through government. If you don't want to give government more money, you are a selfish prig. Boilerplate leftism.

The closest thing to "interesting" in the article is that the example of government-centric caring she keeps going back to involves government taking more money from lower-income people, and giving it to one person (as a salary for that one person's personal use) that will be in charge of doling out books and sewing classes to the masses.

Other than that, it's just another example of that tired genre of the America-hating pundit anthropologizing in flyover country.