vtsnowedin wrote:Before you schedule the funeral for the small rural communities you might want to check how many of them have balanced budgets and manageable debt compared to the major cities which are billions behind in spite of sky high tax rates.
You need a tax base to have government services and debt, ghosts don't pay taxes—but yeah, no debt.
Small towns are dying: industrial ag, automation, walmart and amazon, offshoring, urban wages and excitement, etc are killing them. The square here has the county courthouse, jail, city hall, title company and one attorney. Walmart out by the interstate, truckstop, farm store, red caboose cafe.
Biggest employers are schools, government, medicine, all mostly tax based.
My Bold:
Metropolitan areas consist of those counties with central cities of at least 50,000, along with the surrounding counties that are economically dependent on them. They make up 36% of all counties. Between 2008, the cusp of the Great Recession, and 2017, they enjoyed nearly 99% of all job and population growth.
What remained of job and population growth was divided among the 21% of counties that are called micropolitans, which have midsized cities with between 10,000 and 50,000 residents, and the remaining 42% of counties that are rural.
Nationally, 71% of all metropolitan counties grew between 2008 and 2017, but more than half of the remaining micropolitan and rural counties did not grow or shrank in population.
I love small towns and rural life, hurts me to see them die. I almost always lived in or around small towns. Since the internet I've hoped it would enable a resurgence, a distributed workforce. I moved way out at the very edge of the internet as soon as it was possible—I have fond hopes for StarLink for the same reason.
Maybe after the collapse of industrial civilization?
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The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities.
-- Abraham Lincoln, Fragment on Government (July 1, 1854)