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.
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City folks don’t give a damn about the sticks. The sticks literally dig their own graves obsessing over urban dwellers.
aug 23, 2025, 6:34 pm • 5 0 • view
Well they do grow the food that we eat
aug 23, 2025, 3:15 pm • 1 0 • view
As a former rural person, rarely. We assign them credit they don’t deserve since much is not fit for human consumption
aug 23, 2025, 7:13 pm • 3 0 • view
and then the cities provide basically every other thing in modern life including most of the tools they use to do that growing
aug 23, 2025, 3:26 pm • 63 0 • view
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
aug 23, 2025, 3:36 pm • 40 2 • view
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.
aug 23, 2025, 3:32 pm • 17 1 • view
With subsidies and then sell it at a profit
aug 23, 2025, 7:34 pm • 3 0 • view
Some of them do
aug 23, 2025, 3:24 pm • 5 0 • view
Only if they're rural areas in Mexico.
aug 24, 2025, 2:19 pm • 0 0 • view
I mean, in California but yeah.
aug 23, 2025, 5:54 pm • 0 0 • view
So? They don’t sell to cities directly. Food is a commodity on the market.
aug 23, 2025, 3:26 pm • 12 0 • view
Brazil has two growing seasons 🤷♂️
aug 23, 2025, 3:51 pm • 0 0 • view
for which we pay them money
aug 23, 2025, 3:47 pm • 18 0 • view
Farming is the least diverse industry in North America.
aug 23, 2025, 9:32 pm • 3 0 • view
Lol
aug 23, 2025, 3:34 pm • 2 0 • view
Second this
aug 23, 2025, 3:27 pm • 1 0 • view
The only thing it underwrites is the Hallmark holiday special industrial complex.
aug 23, 2025, 8:11 pm • 8 0 • view
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.
aug 23, 2025, 4:06 pm • 59 6 • view
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....
aug 23, 2025, 3:39 pm • 220 16 • view
I have always wanted a “no bankers, no food” bumper sticker.
aug 23, 2025, 8:04 pm • 1 0 • view
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.....
aug 25, 2025, 9:58 pm • 1 0 • view
If you drove today, thank a factory worker.
aug 25, 2025, 12:56 am • 0 0 • view
I'd go with a suitably obscure bumper sticker: "Lisa Douglas Was Right!"
aug 24, 2025, 12:02 am • 1 0 • view
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.....
aug 25, 2025, 1:21 pm • 1 0 • view
If you're a cancer survivor, thank big city doctors and nurses...and the "elitist/woke" universities they attended.
aug 23, 2025, 6:35 pm • 56 2 • view
And the government who until recently funded the research to bring progress and new therapies to the market
aug 23, 2025, 9:56 pm • 12 0 • view
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
aug 23, 2025, 6:52 pm • 0 0 • view
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
aug 23, 2025, 6:06 pm • 11 2 • view
It’s a mostly one sided beef, urban folks mostly don’t think about rural areas while rural people blame cities for their problems.
aug 23, 2025, 6:18 pm • 23 1 • view
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
aug 23, 2025, 7:35 pm • 21 1 • view
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.
aug 23, 2025, 7:47 pm • 8 0 • view
Sorry… real…🤣
aug 25, 2025, 2:54 pm • 0 0 • view
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...)
aug 24, 2025, 12:04 pm • 0 0 • view
In addition to blue states effectively underwriting the low taxes of red states for decades.
aug 23, 2025, 9:56 pm • 7 0 • view