re: #195 freetoken

Similar stories can be told all over Trump-land.

In my hometown there used to be meat-packing plants. They are all gone now…

But it used to be a guy with just a basic education could get a job there, get a wage good enough to have a life.

Now all that location has is Walmart jobs.

So yes, the despair from the down-grading of employment is real.

This is after all what the collective concern is over the top 1% collecting all the wealth and the bottom half of the country continually losing buying power.

True, although the thing about mining is that it’s really pretty much limited to where the coal is, whereas manufacturing is more ‘portable’. So folks in the coalmining areas end up jobless in the middle of nowhere, rather than jobless in a metro area.

One thing struck me from the thread:

Local unemployment can also be thought of as local overpopulation. That is, there are more people living there than there are jobs to support them. But if you believe that the size of your town is The Size God Intended, then you need something to provide jobs enough for those people.

And there’s a lot of racism in this, too. When manufacturing left the cities, leaving urban blacks stranded with no jobs in the cities, the response was “Look at those lazy black people! The depend on welfare, they use drugs, and can’t keep their families together!” Now that the SAME THING is happening to an area that’s largely rural and overwhelmingly white, the response is, “Look at those poor people, who had their way of life STOLEN!!!”