Heartland Voters Forgotten

Drive 30 minutes from Downtown and the politics of both Missouri and Kansas become far less dynamic and draw less attention from both sides. This missive shares a worthwhile perspective on how elected officials from BOTH parties are taking yet another constituency for granted.

Checkit:

Rural areas are being left behind

The drive from St. Joseph to Jefferson City covers 220 miles, with small portions of the journey crossing Missouri's cities and suburbs. No matter the route, most of this drive goes through rolling hills and fields broken up by silos and the occasional water tower.

Comments

  1. They've left themselves behind. They consider growth industry like technology full of libtards. Ever go to small towns? They are full of an educated white trash on welfare. Aside from the teachers in town, the pharmacist, and a few business owners there is nothing but low-level jobs filled by poor working people. Ask a conservative when this country was at its peak and they'll probably tell you the 1950's. In the 1950's union membership was almost 40%. There is nothing conservatives hate more than unions. Once the unions were mostly broken and wealth became more unevenly distributed rural America was damaged the most. I'm from Pittsburg, KS and the poverty there is striking. It has really increased the last 25 years. There is so much meth. A good 15% of the houses should be knocked down. The place looks like Appalachia in a lot of places as does the rest of rural America. Why in the hell would a company move to one of these places? Do you think Amazon wants to move their headquarters to Kansas, where they routinely argue about evolution? Farmers are getting killed by Trump but they would vote for him again tomorrow. We can't help these people.

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  2. You wanna 'see' why rural America is in the shape it's in, tune in to 680 AM, Monday-Friday 8:00-10:00 AM for the St. Joseph local call-in "belly-ache" show. I mention this because this article is from the St. Joseph News-Pressed.

    The show I mention is where locals call in to gripe, bitch and belly-ache about local and world news and issues. Pretty much all the people who call in sounds like they are 80-years old and about to drop dead of old age at any moment. They hate anything that's not them or what they think "everyone should be like" or "how the world should be".

    And read the comments in the St. Joseph News-Press, like this:
    https://www.newspressnow.com/users/profile/goldfish/

    It's like the Salem Witch Trials up in NW Missouri when it comes to the locals' attitudes about things.

    Who wants to go and move to be part of that?

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  3. But Trump said he brought all those manufacturing jobs back.

    He signed the best farm bill (Green Acres!) filled with food stamps and bailouts.

    He said America is booming and never been better.

    He wasn't going to forget the forgotten man.

    He lied???

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  4. 1:22 you don’t pay attention to economic signals

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  5. There's the landed gentry and then there's the poor white trash. They all vote for the same ol same ol.

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  6. I don't think being left behind is really the way to describe the phenomena going on in small towns. Automation in farming has been the main driver in what small towns look like. The crops from a 180-acre farm used to provide the livelihood for middle class farming families. Those families (usually with a lot of kids) lived, ate, received an education, shopped, and were entertained in towns within a 15 minute drive. Now, a single family farms over 1,000 acres to maintain a middle class lifestyle and that means 1/10th of the people to maintain small towns. No longer is it viable to have a town every 15 minutes - there just isn't enough people to sustain a large number of businesses.

    Yes, some of these communities attracted niche manufacturing that helped create non-farm jobs but that's the exception. Just like farming, automation has made it more likely to see large-scale manufacturing in larger metros with larger populations to staff these places. You can't build a GM plant in the middle of Kansas.

    These communities are not dying though. They are evolving. They will look different in 20 years, just like our inner cities and suburbs. The have's and have-nots are just a lot easier to see in small towns though. They will survive and I tend to believe that something none of us can predict (i.e. technology) will transform the way our population is distributed in 20 years.

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  7. We Will Survive1/7/19, 9:28 AM

    National agenda of both parties for 40-50 years has been to increase large corporate farms and export manufacturing jobs.
    People herded into cities can be controlled more easily.
    Globalist agenda does not benefit the middle class.

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  8. 8:59 is correct in his assessment. One more thing most ambitious kids leave small towns where there is little opportunity. Those left behind are much more likely to waste their lives with meth and alcohol. Kind of like the ambitious moved from Europe to the US 150 years ago leaving behind the lazy Europeans of today.

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  9. bullshit some towns are stagnated or dying but ALL growth is in the larger towns and suburbs

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  10. grandparents live outside Versailles everybody got laid off in 08 and replaced with recruited immigrants

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  11. 16 years of Sam Graves and Roy Blunt. What do you expect?

    Now throw in a dose of Dontard Trump and his butt licker boi, Josh Hawley and the Shit Heel will be a wasteland on par with Kansas.

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  12. were they wiping butts at the nursing home when they got replaced by migrant labor?

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  13. 1:10 I know all about those JUCO fucks in SEK. I graduated from Pitt in 95 and we would have to fight those assholes from Coffeyville, Ft. Scott, Parsons, NEO all the time. I and tell you how many times I would see 5 black guys jump the drunkest, littlest freshman they could find. I have a friend in the KBI who has an office in Pittsburg now. For decades the KBI had one office in Topeka but they opened one in Pittsburg about 20 years ago, mostly because of meth and crime. Smll towns are dying. My wife's parents go to a couple of funerals a week in Erie, Ks. There church is dying because the parishioners are dying and their kids have moved away to get a job..

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  14. Trump has us winning so hard.

    Those new farm taxes are really working.

    more bailouts coming?

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