The Washington Post‘s Paul Farhi wrote a piece last month (12/9/16) reporting that “major newspapers, from the Washington Post to the New York Times, have struggled to find and publish pro-Trump columns for months.” Perhaps that explains why some of the Trump-sympathizing columns they do manage to turn up—like a piece that ran today in the Times (1/5/17)—leave a lot to be desired in terms of logic and accuracy.
To be fair, the Times op-ed wasn’t written by a self-professed Trump fan, but by Robert Leonard, the news director for an Iowa country music station, who says, “I consider myself fairly liberal,” and confesses that he has “struggled to understand how these conservative friends and neighbors I respect—and at times admire—can think so differently from me.”
Key to understanding these Trump-voting neighbors, Leonard says, is their theological belief that people are born bad. Though to hear him explain their worldview, it would be more accurate to say they believe that progressives are born bad: The conservative culture, he writes,
views liberals as loathsome, misinformed and weak, even dangerous…. Rural conservatives feel that their world is under siege, and that Democrats are an enemy to be feared and loathed.
Rural Trump fans, on the other hand, are apparently the salt of the earth: “They’re hard workers…. They are conservative, believe in hard work, family, the military and cops,” he says of two representative Trump enthusiasts of his acquaintance, teenage go-getters whom he quotes declaring: “Let’s go to work. Let the liberals sleep in.”
It’s not clear how this kind of name-calling and chest-beating contributes to anyone’s understanding of national politics, but I’ll skip over Leonard’s musings on Original Sin, which are hardly factcheckable, and take a look instead at his economic analysis of the urban/rural divide, to which he attributes much of Trump’s attraction:
In state capitols across America, lawmakers spend billions of dollars to take a few seconds off a city dweller’s commute to his office, while rural counties’ farm-to-market roads fall into disrepair. Some of the paved roads in my region are no longer maintained and are reverting to gravel….
In cities, firefighters and EMTs are professionals whose departments are funded by local, state and federal tax dollars. Rural America relies on volunteers….
Urban police officers have the latest in computer equipment and vehicles, while small-town cops go begging….
In this view, blue counties are where most of our tax dollars are spent, and that’s where all of our laws are written and passed. To rural Americans, sometimes it seems our taxes mostly go to making city residents live better.
Now, Leonard does follow this up this litany by saying that “we recognize that the truth is more complex.” That’s one way to put it. Another way to put it is that this is total nonsense. Rural areas do not subsidize urban areas; rather, it’s the cities that subsidize the countryside. As Mother Jones (2/16/12) has pointed out:
Among predominantly rural states, 81 percent received more federal spending than they paid in taxes. In contrast, 44 percent of urban states received more federal spending than they paid in taxes.
When states look at their internal divisions between rural and urban counties, they find the same thing. In Indiana, notes New Geography (2/4/10):
Just the consolidated city-county of Indianapolis/Marion County sends $420 million more to the state annually than it receives every year. That’s equal to the entire public safety budget of the city. The rest of the metro area sends another $340 million to the state annually.
Similarly, a 2009 Georgia State University study found that the Atlanta metro area accounted for 61 percent of state tax collections but only 47 percent of expenditures. A 2004 University of Louisville study found that the state’s three major urban regions—Louisville, Lexington and Northern Kentucky (south suburban Cincinnati)—generate over half the state’s tax revenues but only receive back about one third in state expenditures, an annual net outflow of $1.4 billion per year.
The blue regions give more than the get when it comes to highway spending. (source: Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy)
Road spending in particular is notoriously skewed toward rural areas. “For all its talk of geographic inequality, rural Minnesota has been getting more than its fair share of road money for a long time,” reports the streets.mn blog (1/14/15), with a map illustrating which counties get less in state highway funds than they contribute (mostly Minneapolis/St. Paul and their suburbs) and which get more (most of the others). A Brookings report (3/1/03) taking Ohio as a case study found that
urban counties consistently took home a smaller share of state highway funds than suburban and rural counties relative to
their amount of vehicle traffic (vehicle miles traveled), car ownership (vehicle registrations) and demand for driving (gasoline sales).
On an individual level, too, rural residents are more likely to receive government benefits than urban or suburban residents; a Pew survey (12/18/12) found that 62 percent of rural residents had received Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare or unemployment benefits, vs. 54 percent of urban dwellers and 53 percent of suburbanites.
I wouldn’t argue that these subsidies are unjustifiable; the countryside, after all, is where we get most of our food from, and the inefficiencies that come with spreading out to work on agricultural land are probably inevitable. But to ignore the fact that taxes generally flow from the metropolitan centers to the hinterlands, in an effort to justify a fantasy of rural grievance, is frankly poisonous. (It’s pointedly a racialized grievance: Leonard’s sole example of the kind of “pure nonsense” that “liberals worry about” is the idea of white privilege, making his stereotypes of hard-working Trump voters and sleepy “liberals” all the more insidious.)
I saved my favorite part of the op-ed’s case against the cities for last. It’s when Leonard complains:
If I have a serious heart attack at home, I’ll be cold to the touch by the time the volunteer ambulance crew from a town 22 miles away gets here.
Yes, if you live out in the country, you’re probably going to be farther away from a hospital than if you live in a big city. You could put a hospital within five miles of everyone—if you built approximately 150,000 new hospitals across the country, about 30 times the current number.
Voting for Trump, though, with the idea that he will do something about the hospitals-too-far-away problem would be childish. If op-ed pages can’t find writers who can make a grown-up case for Trump, perhaps they should be willing to allow the case to go unmade.
Jim Naureckas, who grew up on a farm in Illinois, is the editor of FAIR.org. You can find him on Twitter at @JNaureckas.
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com, or write to public editor Liz Spayd at public@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes or @SpaydL). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission from FAIR.