Today my parents and I visited my sister and her husband in a small town in eastern pa. This is not a 1 stop-light town. This is a no stop-light town. 50+ years ago there was a railroad and major feed/supply operations, which drove a healthy economy, multiple groceries, inns, restaurants, and even a movie theater. The large homes and mansions can still be recognized behind the grime, plywood, and ruin. Today, the railroad is gone, as are all of those other things. Now it is empty homes, dilapidated occupied homes, boarded up inns and restaurants. The one local mart and “diner” that was the hub of the town recently closed, leaving the townspeople to travel 10-15 miles for a gallon of milk or a hot served breakfast, and leaving 4 employees plus the owners jobless.
Walking around, you can see why. Every other house was for sale. The ones that weren’t are falling down on themselves or already foreclosed on. There is no industry or jobs within 30 miles. There simply aren’t enough customers with money to be patrons at this small local grocery and eatery. It is but the last of the businesses in town to fail and close. The residents that are left, travel 40+ miles to work in Scranton and Binghamton and buy their groceries there and can’t afford to go out to eat.
As we walked the dogs around town, my father made a comment to me. Sarcastically. “You know, if the lawmakers would just cut taxes for corporations and business owners, so the job creators could do their thing, that grocery/diner wouldn’t have had to close. Clearly the money would have ‘trickled down’ and they could have stayed open and created new jobs. Obviously the tax burden was too high, and had nothing to do with the fact that nobody within 20 miles had any money to spend.”
I was just thinking about this kind of thing the other day. There was recently a list in Forbes about the most miserable cities in the U.S. for 2011 and a lot of the cities listed have had issues for a long, long time. It was no surprise to find Detroit and Flint on the list. Both cities have been in horrifyingly bad condition for as long as I can remember and it doesn’t seem like anyone there has been able to do anything to improve the cities. Or maybe they have been trying and their efforts haven’t made any sort of difference.
But what the heck do you do to improve a city that has fallen that far? If it were as simple as changing the tax structure I’d think they would have done that long ago but then again I don’t have any answers either. I have no idea what I would do to fix the town if I were elected mayor of Flint tomorrow. How do you bring prosperity back to a city like Detroit or where your sister lives?
Well, we tried positive incentives and they haven’t worked. We cut their taxes and they just decided to relax with all that extra money instead of creating jobs.
So let’s try some negative incentives. Let’s impose some confiscatory taxes and take all that old wealth away from them. That’ll get them up off their butts and motivate them to start making some new wealth.
I’d be interested to know how many of these ‘job creators’ have actually, y’know, created any jobs. I’d wager many of them, have sent more jobs over seas, than they’ve created. I’d like to see some kind of tally, created vs destroyed.
Isn’t it self evident that the people now being labeled ‘job creators’ are the ones who shipped the jobs overseas? How is giving them tax breaks going to help?
That’s the question I’ve had and so far have seen no answer, or even no one asking the question - where the heck are all the jobs that the “jobs creators” should be generating with their tax breaks?
I will say, the other end of Pennsylvania seems to be thriving. I have family up in Beaver and Butler counties, and I remember those areas being desolate in the 1970s and '80s as the steel industry in that area died off. Now, though, Pittsburgh looks like it’s bustling, and the dying little towns seem to be revived suburbs, attracting new young residents. No idea how this came about.
Do you have any insight into the Erie area? I left about six years ago. It was really hurting then, but with some of the suburban growth you’re talking about. Still, it was a little surreal to see the reactions when I mentioned that I had recently moved there; no one could fathom that anyone would move to Erie. Perhaps that has changed, but I don’t have enough of a connection to the place to know from word of mouth.