Fate of the States: The New Geography of American Prosperity by Whitney Meredith

Author:Whitney, Meredith [Whitney, Meredith]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-06-03T23:00:00+00:00

Poverty Rate (2010)

Why is this growth in poverty in the United States occurring at such an astounding pace? The answer: jobs, jobs, and jobs. For decades, the housing boom papered over an undereducated and undertrained workforce with a strong and steady flow of new jobs in construction, real estate, and mortgage finance. Some states, such as Florida and California, had their entire economies transformed by housing. The housing bust exposed a labor force whose skills and training were simply out of date. The states that during the boom boasted the strongest rise in home prices, the biggest booms in new-home building, and the highest number of jobs created from the housing sector are now in the worst position to retrain their unemployed masses. Unemployment in Nevada, California, and Florida tripled between 2000 and 2010. Florida’s jump in unemployment was 50 percent higher than the national average. Whereas Alaska, Washington, D.C., Oregon, and Mississippi had the highest unemployment rates in 2000, by 2010 it was Nevada, California, and Florida topping the list.15

Without job training, food stamps and welfare just create another sort of dependency. Nobody wants to live on food stamps. Anyone who has witnessed the shame and embarrassment of someone using food stamps at a local grocery store understands that. What people want are jobs, and it is ultimately the responsibility of the state to provide the training and economic environment required to create jobs. At a minimum it is in the best interest of the states to provide job training to get their residents back to work. However, unless the federal government specifically directs and administers monies for jobs training, most states cannot afford the large-scale job-training programs needed to resuscitate their economies. The Great Recession resulted in states depleting their unemployment-insurance trust funds as high unemployment rates persisted alongside the depressed economy. Many states that relied upon federal assistance to help with unemployment insurance now must pay the federal government back. It’s yet another example of how borrowing money against future tax revenues has undercut states’ ability to fund key services—such as job training.

We have to break the cycle of poverty in this country. We all know how to do it: Invest in education and create jobs. What’s so harrowing about the fiscal condition of many states today is that achieving those goals seems antithetical to the financial realities. But what other option is there? There is no way a society with such a high and growing poverty rate can sustain itself without truly calamitous consequences. It doesn’t have to be this way, though. There is a solution right in front of us that U.S. politicians have been embarrassingly slow to embrace: privatization.

Imagine you are in a financial bind. Your choices: Use your kids’ college savings fund to make ends meet or miss some mortgage payments, which could mean losing the family home. Put in that situation, you’d look for an alternative. Before draining the college savings fund or ditching your mortgage, you might sell the second car, hawk some valuables on eBay, or cancel the annual Christmas vacation.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.