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Rural America

Saturday 20th of April 2024

Rural America [T]he assault on the safety net is espe- cially harmful to rural America, which relies heavily on safety-net programs. Of the 100 counties with the highest percentage of their population receiving food stamps, 85 are rural, and most of the rest are in small metropolitan areas. The expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which Trump keeps trying to kill, had its biggest positive impact on rural areas. Paul Krugman, New York Times, May 9, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Rural America But the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. Willa Cather, O Pioneers! © 2017 Kwiple.com
Rural America But the true losers from the romanticisation of rural life are, I suspect, rural-dwellers themselves. Their social problems get lost in the credulous notion of the countryside as the seat of virtue. Their economic decline is obscured by our wonder at the pastoral sublime. They might be poor, this line of thought seems to go, but what ravishing views they have. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, June 15, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Rural America Exit polls showed that 62 percent of the rural vote went to Donald Trump, compared with 50 percent of the suburban vote and only 35 percent of the urban vote. Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind © 2018 Kwiple.com
Rural America From 2010 to 2020, more than 130 of the 1,800 rural hospitals in America went out of business. At the start of 2020, almost half of the rest were at “high risk”  of closure, according to the nonprofit Center  for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. The situation grew even worse as the pandemic diminished the frequency of money-making elective surgeries and a growing demand for health-care workers caused hospital payrolls to soar. Many hospitals were kept open only by infusions of federal money. BloombergBusinesswork, January 28, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Rural America In terms of poverty, college attainment, teenage births, divorce, death rates from heart disease and cancer, reliance on federal disability insurance, and male labor-force participation, rural counties now rank the worst among the four major U.S. population groupings (the others are big cities, suburbs and medium or small metro areas). Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Rural America The melancholy of having to count souls Where they grow fewer and fewer every year Is extreme where they shrink to none at all. It must be I want life to go on living. from “The Census-Taker,” by Robert Frost  © 2017 Kwiple.com
Rural America The moral outrage of rural America is a mixture of fear and anger. The fear is that  small-town ways of life are disappearing. The anger is that they are under siege. The outrage cannot be understood apart from the loyalties that rural Americans feel toward their communities. It stems from the fact that the social expectations, relationships, and obligations that constitute the moral communities they take for granted and in which they live are year by year being fundamentally fractured. Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind © 2018 Kwiple.com
Rural America Of the 19,000 incorporated places in the United States, 18,000 of them have populations less than 25,000. 14,000 are located outside of an urbanized area. This is rural America.  Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind © 2018 Kwiple.com
Rural America Over the past decades, 128 rural hospitals shut down as a result of financial pressure and 400 more were at risk of closing before the coronavirus pandemic, according to to the National Rural Health Association. Rural areas have 20% of the U.S. population and 9% of physicians, the group said. Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Rural America Rural America Is the New ‘Inner City’ — — — — — A Wall Street Journal analysis shows that since the 1990s, sparsely populated counties have replaced large cities as America's most troubled areas by key measures of socioeconomic well-being – a decline that's accelerating citation front-age headline, Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Rural America Rural communities are places of moral obligation. Residents can live there and be so independent that they rarely speak to anyone else. But if they do live that way, they are treated as outsiders. Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind © 2018 Kwiple.com
Rural America Rural communities's view of Washington usually emerge in two competing narratives: on the one hand, the government ignores us and doesn't do anything to help with our problems, and, on the other hand, the government constantly intrudes in our lives without understanding us and thus makes our problems worse. Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind © 2018 Kwiple.com
Rural America Since 2010 the amount of bad debt at rural hospitals has jumped 50%, according to the National Rural Health Association. It sets a vicious cycle in motion:  A depressed economy leads to unpaid bills; unpaid bills lead to hospital closures; the closures strip the local economy of higher-wage jobs; and the economy gets more depressed.  The National Institutes of Health estimates that when a rural hospital closes, per capita income in the surrounding county dips an average of 4%. BloombergBusinesswork, January 28, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Rural America Their sense of moral obligation cuts both ways: don't be a burden if you can help it, and pitch in generously when you can be of help. Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind, on rural Americans © 2018 Kwiple.com
Rural America These relationships, obligations, and common understandings are what I have called the “moral community.” … Being part of a moral community, even when it sits lightly on people's shoulders, means that sensing your community is declining and your young people are falling behind is a reflection in small measure on you. You may not be affected personally, but you are part of a failing community. The school that closes is yours. You may be well educated yourself, but you feel that people consider you a hick simply because of where you live. Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind © 2018 Kwiple.com
Rural America  We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity and dignity. Sarah Palin, quoting without attribution what columist Westbrook Peglar said in 1940 © 2020 Kwiple.com
 
Rural America What seems right is what has seemed right for a long time. Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind © 2018 Kwiple.com