Recently visited Boston for the first time. My impression was that it really, really has its shit together.
Maybe the answer to problems like this is massive travel advertising of places like Boston in places like Kentucky. If any place is"coastal elite", it is Boston, right? But why do they hate coastal elites so much? Because they have a functioning society? Clean streets? A big mosaic across from the commons that reads “Embrace Reason” dating back to 1830 or some such? Because it is Catholic dominated?
The question we want to provoke is: if libruls are such evil America hating maniacs, how come where you live is so dramatically fucked up compared to where they live? Visit Boston and find out!
Put them side by side and I think it would be hard to miss. But hey, I have been wrong about America before, lots of us have, just look at the current state of affairs. It might work…
I don’t really think that’s the case in Kentucky - Kentucky knows darn well it has loads of poor white people in Appalachia. Granted they have a lot of black people in places like Louisville, but Kentucky is full of small poor towns - even outside of Appalachia.
I don’t think the primary driver is race. I think the primary driver is class and the idea that somehow, the poor are a burden to the rest of us - especially the combination of poor and sick, and the faster they die, the less of a drain they will be on society. Its one of the reasons we are only paying lip service to the opioid epidemic.
We could speed it up and call it “Operation Compassionate Death” but that’s been used.
And you’re not going to convince me (us?) that providing an otherwise-qualified able-bodied person health care without demanding they perform 80 hours a month of approved and appropriately-documented work or work activity with zero tolerance for failure is some onerous burden on society.
I’d say it’s at the very least the problem of assuming that there isn’t merely one primary caregiver; there is one sole caregiver. The very notion of two or more people splitting both the earning and the caregiving has never occurred to Bevin. Fuck that shit.
What makes it more difficult to understand is that these areas (Appalachia and the upper Midwest) are ground zero for the opioid epidemic, yet these same areas are the ones becoming more conservative. Yes, there are poor people, including poor blacks, in places like Boston, New York, Portland, and Seattle, but one of the reasons these so called “coastal elites” are doing better overall than the people in Appalachia and the upper Midwest is because those places have a stronger social safety net.
I suspect your arrow of causality goes the other way. They have a stronger social safety net (and lets be clear - no state in the U.S. has a strong social safety net) because they can afford to have one. And they can afford to have one for a lot of reasons - their population is more educated. They’ve been able to attract and retain businesses that require that education. They aren’t dependent on consumable resources (coal, iron) and the factory jobs disappeared from the North, Northeast and West (except for Michigan) starting immediately after WWII - they lost their jobs to the lower wage South, just like the South has been losing them overseas and to automation - they are a generation ahead in that particular cycle.
Particularly galling, in my opinion, is that no one received notice of the cancellation, prompting dentists and other providers to have to turn away patients. Including children, who were supposed to be unaffected by the cancellation.
Does anybody know what processes are in place in KY to validate, record, and credit hours volunteered? Is there a clearinghouse of sorts that would put people seeking to meet their requirements together with people who are in need of volunteers and eligible to sign off on the work hours as having been performed?
Is this administrative function paid for by the people seeking to maintain eligibility, or by the state? If by the state, is it carried out by a state office (staffed with workers on the public payroll), or by a contracted private agency?