I’m going to quote tweet Jarrett’s column the whole way to Boston today, but I want to start with these very basic stats. “The five southeastern counties are home to about 32% of PA residents, and contribute around 40% of the state’s tax dollars” thephiladelphiacitizen.org/southeastern...
Hey PA might need that money for another couple stadiums in Pittsburgh.
This idea that somehow rural areas underwrite metros is not only wrong, it’s entirely inverted — and yet it perversely animates basically every element of our current political life.
City folks don’t give a damn about the sticks. The sticks literally dig their own graves obsessing over urban dwellers.
Well they do grow the food that we eat
As a former rural person, rarely. We assign them credit they don’t deserve since much is not fit for human consumption
and then the cities provide basically every other thing in modern life including most of the tools they use to do that growing
yeah seriously, these people wouldn't have roads or telecoms or electricity or a good portion of their jobs or infrastructure were it not for the city subsidizing them, because on their own they lack the population density to justify market capitalism providing any of that for them
When so much of the country is growing federally subsidized corn and soy, nope. We import more than half our fruit and at least a third of our veg.
With subsidies and then sell it at a profit
Some of them do
Only if they're rural areas in Mexico.
I mean, in California but yeah.
So? They don’t sell to cities directly. Food is a commodity on the market.
Brazil has two growing seasons 🤷♂️
for which we pay them money
Farming is the least diverse industry in North America.
Lol
Second this
The only thing it underwrites is the Hallmark holiday special industrial complex.
it’s so cool that 80% of the us population live in cities and so many small towns are on the brink of functional collapse but one set of people is Real in a way everyone else is Not.
There are bumper stickers that say "if you ate today, thank a farmer". I always wanted to get one that says, "If you farmed today, thank an urban taxpayer". But that might have been impolite....
I have always wanted a “no bankers, no food” bumper sticker.
That too. Somebody once said "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs", which kind of fits. Albeit, he had a fairly dim view of bankers, but, hey.....
If you drove today, thank a factory worker.
I'd go with a suitably obscure bumper sticker: "Lisa Douglas Was Right!"
How about "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs". They're unlikely to spot the origin of that one, either.....
If you're a cancer survivor, thank big city doctors and nurses...and the "elitist/woke" universities they attended.
And the government who until recently funded the research to bring progress and new therapies to the market
like when the confederacy thought the way to win the war was by not selling their cotton. It was a genius move that apparently taught zero lessons
If I put bumper stickers on my car, I’d have both of those. Cities and rural areas are both important, a strong country needs both to be healthy. The urban-rural fighting is another fake division created by the right
It’s a mostly one sided beef, urban folks mostly don’t think about rural areas while rural people blame cities for their problems.
yeah seriously. NOBODY gets elected by making fun of the sticks, while rural america elects hundreds or even thousands every other year precisely because they explicitly promise to stick it to metro areas and make the "degenerates" who live here suffer
The right has for sometime used the ideal that rural white folks are the only reel Americans. That said, the message should always be that Mass Transit helps stop climate change. There will be no farms if the climate collapses.
Sorry… real…🤣
That's a wise and charitable response. It's also the point. In a well-organized province or state, benefits and costs should be structured to provide reasonably equivalent service levels (never perfect, ofc, but one should try...)
Holy shit. I live in AZ now, but I’m a Philly gal. I’m damned proud of them
