I am willing to bet the answer to the OP is the people in rural states are absolutely convinced they pay more in taxes in order to support inner-city poor folk. They simply do not see the benefits they get as welfare but see “welfare queens” as unfairly sponging off of their hard work.
This is a view conservatives carefully perpetuate.
I say they should put up or shut-up. If democrats ever get control of the government pass a law that says each state can’t get back more than it contributes. If these rural folk are so sure they are being screwed over in the current scheme they should whole-heartedly support such a measure.
As someone pointed out, rural folks consider taking any form of social assistance as shameful.
So they deny to their neighbors and friends that they do.
The numbers don’t lie, though. They absolutely take welfare, they just see themselves as deserving of a helping hand in their “temporary” state, while those others are just lazy bums looking for a handout.
The complaint about hospitals really points this out. A city has multiple hospitals in walking distance because there is enough population to support it.
Rural areas do not have the populations to support a hospital anywhere nearby, so those are subsidized, otherwise, they would not be there. You can see that as how when the ACA is being dismantled, it is the rural hospitals that are closing, not the urban ones. City people pay more for medical services, and more in taxes, so that rural areas have access to good healthcare. The rural areas then fight tooth and nail against the very programs they rely on, then complain when their hospital is shut down because of the policies that they support.
Urban folk really are trying to support the rural communities. Having rural communities does add to the diversity and richness of our nation, and are worth supporting for that reason, even if they are not economically viable. The family farm has been non-viable as a business model since the great depression, but urban areas pay more in taxes, and pay more for food, in order to support the lifestyle of those who want it.
Just maintaining roads and infrastructure of these remote areas is not sustainable based on their own local tax base. They need to be supported by the affluent cities. Then they complain that the roads aren’t good enough, even though they cost more, and serve fewer people.
But, any time the rural areas demand even more, and don’t get all of what they want, they call it urban areas screwing them over.
If the urban folk really wanted to screw over rural folk, they would join the rural folk in wanting to cut their state and federal taxes, and have communities subsist solely on their own local taxes. If the urban areas were no longer bleeding money to support the rural lifestyle, they’d have far more resources to concentrate on their own needs, and pay less in taxes as well.
The rural areas would all die, and all the family farms would be bought up by large agricultural corps.
Excellent post, @k9bfriender! While several people have said that urban folk subsidize rural folk, you’ve really given a full, clear, fair, well-written explanation.
What I find so frustrating is how much complaining rural America does about “welfare queens” and taxes. We carry them and they bitch and moan the whole time.
At which point you’ll all get even crappier food and pay a lot more money for it.
A handful of large corporations aren’t trying to take control of the food supply out of the goodness of their hearts.
Look: the cities couldn’t exist without the rural areas, which are producing their food, their water, and their air (and absorbing a whole lot of their garbage, which is endangering the first three.) The rural areas couldn’t exist in their current form without the cities. A high percentage of people in both areas are working their butts off. This business of either group snarling at the other as welfare queens is not useful, and very annoying.
And as near as I can tell nearly everybody complains about paying taxes, whether they’re in the city or the country or the suburbs, and whether or not they’ve got large amounts of money left after they’re done paying them; but IME while a few rural people do go on about paying for welfare a lot more complain about paying for high salaries being paid to upper-level officials based in the cities. That may (or may not) also be unjustified, but it doesn’t fit the stereotype some are trying to push.
Most of the money is spent on cities, true. But most of the money also comes from cities, and most of the people live in the cities, so this makes sense. In fact, more money flows from urban areas to rural ones than the other way around:
So the rural folk may feel like most of the money is being spent on urban counties, but that’s like saying that most of the representatives in the House come from the big states – true, but the little states are still vastly overrepresented. Rural counties may get less but it’s still more than their fair share.
Now, maybe that’s OK, because maybe rural counties tend to be underdeveloped and need that aid. Or maybe they’re using their oversized voting bloc to seize an oversized share of the pie.
Nah. We didn’t pay more for any other products when they started being produced in scale. That’s not how things generally work.
Can you make an argument as to why consolidating the production, labor and equipment would cost more than having each farm responsible for its own?
What do you mean by crappier? That the wheat and corn is crappier? or that the processing into food that we eat is?
I have no love for megacorps, and would prefer to keep the smaller corporation that is known as a family farm around. But the threat that food prices would go up, and quality would go down, does not follow from any other economic argument made for any other industry.
No, they are doing it because they want to make a profit. They can more efficiently manage the farm land. Much better than a small farmer trying to survive.
And, if we are no longer worried about keeping the family farm tradition going, then us taxpayers would be less inclined to provide subsidies and price supports to these corporations.
We may have slightly less variety, but in general, food prices would go down, quality would stay the same, and less tax money would go to provide support for a non-viable business model.
Cities couldn’t exist without the rural areas, but we don’t need the people on them. It is preferable that they are there, but it is not necessary. It is preferable enough that cities are willing to spend a significant amount of the wealth that they generate to preserve these areas and their people, but, if they no longer did, no one in a city would notice a thing.
Absolutely true.
Yep.
Once again, very true. But, it is a one sided snarl fest. The rural people resent the “welfare queens” in the urban areas. The urban people don’t mind their taxes going to support the rural areas.
Sure, I just had to send in my quarterly tax payment checks to the IRS and I bitched a bit as I kept adding zeros.
But, complaint is different from action. One side is actually cutting taxes, and the other side is trying to raise them.
I’m willing to pay a bit more in taxes to keep Farmer McFarmer from losing the land that has been in his family for generations. I’m willing to pay to make sure that he has access to education and medical care. I’m willing to pay for the bridge that costs the same as a bridge in my city, but sees 1% the traffic.
He, on the other hand, is not willing to pay the taxes necessary to provide him with these services, as he has been told that his taxes go to provide services to those in the city.
Those officials are paid by city taxes. Not sure why rural folks would care.
I really only see the stereotyping going one way, where the rural folks complain about what goes on in cities. Where they inaccurately claim that their taxes are going to support city services and “welfare queens”.
The city folk don’t complain about what goes on in the rural areas, except to correct the rural folks in their inaccurate portrayals of what goes on in a city and who funds it. The pointing out that cities support the rural areas is not a complaint, it is a factual explanation as to why the argument that the rural person is making is based on a mendacious foundation.
Obviously, this is not Akaj’s actual position, as noted by the /s at the end of the post.
However, that is a statement that I have heard on several occasions from gun advocates on this very board.
I know that @Bone specifically said that he would not be against a gun registration, except that he knew that it could be used for confiscation. And he is not the only one to have expressed that sentiment.
A discussion I had with one of the bears on the board, (either bear_neno or banquet bear, I think) revolved around how to create a gun registry that the government could not access unless a gun was used in a crime, or something.
Those are not even close to the only times that I have seen this claim made.
Most of them relate to policies that are supported by the politicians the rural people support.
Regardless, unlike insulin and other pharmaceuticals, everyone needs food, and there is no food insurance to hide the cost from most people.
There is not only one agricorp, and there would be quite a bit of popular support to do some monopoly busting if one managed to consolidate and raise prices. Price fixing is already illegal, and would be well enforced with as much interest as most people would have in preventing price gouging on food.
And even if the cities did stop supporting agricultural subsidies, along with supporting the towns and population that supports the farming communities, it wouldn’t wipe out everyone. There would be enough demand for artisanal or otherwise smaller scale production that it would probably simply reverse from the current 20% owned by agricorps to 20% owned by smaller scale farm operations.
You mean those grown on family farms right now?
The policies supported by the different groups show that it is definitive that the rural areas resent the urban far more than vice versa.
Ah, you said “cities”, and those are usually only in one city, and not often the largest. The don’t make up a very large number of people, and an insignificant part of the budget. They are still paid for primarily by the cities.
And they are typically making less than they would if they applied their skills in the private sector.
That’s really a complaint?
Is it just a general complaint, like when people complain about regulations, but can’t actually name a particular regulation that they are against, or are there actual offices that they feel should be cut, or should employ lower quality individuals?
There’s a bit of generalization, in saying that the rural populace supports conservative principles, when it is only that most of the populace supports conservative principles, just as it is only the majority, not the entirety of people who live in urban areas that support progressive policies. So in that regard, sure. But that is a bit necessary when talking about the voting habits of those areas, and is not, IMHO insulting in any way.
Did you want to point out the stereotypes that you have seen in this thread? I re-read it, and as I said, other than generalizing a bit on the politics of different regions, I am not seeing it.
However, I am seeing references to welfare queens and complaints about lazy city dwellers who will take an ambulance to a hospital within walking distance.
Perhaps the 25 or so largest metro areas in the U.S. should be broken out as separate states. Then the surrounding rural areas would be neither dominated nor subsidized by them.
I live in a suburb of a large metro area. It seems very purple here – I first heard of antifa setting all the west-coast fires from a comment by a maskless guy in a convenience store, and I saw a HPV pedal by with a really large Individual-ONE flag on it. But we also have a fair number of people who are not like that.
If you want to make these divisions, how would you do it? Gerrymander the boundaries to make the urban/rural states as monochromatic as possible? And make sure all the highway signs have color-coded posts so you know the tenor of the state you have just passed into?
Seems like a lot more effort and a lot less rewarding than trying to work out how we can get along with each other.
Use something like the shortest splitline algorithm and be done with it. You may get some areas which lean heavily one way or another but it should all balance out.
I can imagine country folk looking at the “hollow mountains” of the city and thinking what do all those people do all day in all those offices that is so important? I have pondered this myself (having been born in a town of less than 2000 people, far from much of anywhere, though we left when I was four so I barely remember it), and the only thing I can come up with is “nothing much good”.
No, the ones that you said we needed to avoid crappy food.
You are the one that said that the family farms are producing crappy food. I don’t know what point you were trying to make with that.
You are correct that in this thread, it has only been observed that city people are called welfare queens, and that charge has not been made by an actual poster.
In the larger world, yes, that is a term that is used for many people in the city.
However, I would not class what you quoted as a stereotype, as the point of the terminology is specific to respond to what is spat at the city people, and it is not speaking of all rural people, just the ones who are trying to screw over the cities for more of the pie. As I said, generalizations of political positions.
No, I did not. I said that getting rid of family farms would mean we’d get even crappier food than we are now. We’re already getting a lot of food from large corporations.
In the larger world, IME, it’s used by some people in both the cities and the country, and is often used without any reference to where the ‘welfare queens’ are supposed to be living.
The rural people I’ve heard complaining about people on welfare are generally complaining about people being on welfare in their own communities; because a fair chunk of their local taxes is used to pay for those benefits.
And I know quite a lot of rural people who don’t complain about it at all.