I hate this shit so much and I refuse to play the “city dwellers must always be humble and servile to their noble country lords” game that too many Americans still buy into.
I am very tired of the way the GOP can say the absolute vilest things imaginable about cities but doing anything other than singing the praises of rural communities is politics suicide.
Problem:
A lot of rural people think they can starve the cities into submission.
I hate to say this but, until we figure out how to synthesize everyone, we're kinda at their mercy.
They’re mostly corn & soy farmers, sucking the USDA tit. They’ll shrivel up & die without their crop insurance and federally subsidized loans. They’re the biggest welfare cheats on this planet, usually to the tune of 7 or 8 figures annually. And every penny of that is blue state, blue city income.
Yup.
And the corn being grown for food — both field and sweet — are mostly grown by farmers not getting the federal money, whose livelihood depends on selling to cities.
Meat might get (more) expensive. Which wouldn’t harm most of us, because we need to reduce that, anyway.
My brother lives & works in a very rural area and there's a sharp divide between wealthy, subsidized "farmers" who don't actually do much work and not-wealthy not-subsidized farmers who don't have much time (or money) to socialize. One group likes to brag about how hard working they are.
Which aligns with our childhood in a different rural area where farmers decided they didn't want to pay property taxes because they owned most of the property so they'd be paying a lot in taxes for schools and stuff so they just... didn't have to pay property taxes. Because of where we lived...
(unincorporated area) we WERE paying property taxes but ALSO had to pay extra for library services and otherwise taxpayer funded summer camp services and were not eligible for taxpayer funded transit to summer camp services. Thanks, "farmers"! Fuck you.
Yeah.
I … have no regrets about selling my grandmother’s land and getting out of it, because it was so dirty, and so corrupt.
So many lies. Even from people we thought were trustworthy.
And they fuck over everyone.
Yeah, I know farmers who work their asses off, are ethical, and are deeply involved in their community.
They aren't the ones getting interviewed about how great Trump is and how much cities should suffer. they also don't have the time or money to stage a takeover of a government building.
They KNOW that rural areas cannot survive without money from urban areas. They're a lot more in touch with reality than this weird shared fantasy so many dipshits have where rural areas (low taxes spread over a very large area) somehow are the ones supporting urban areas (high taxes, concentrated).
