Mainstream Media's "Rural Resentment" Myth Is Misplaced

Rural America continues to be a topic of political conversation. For many journalists and pundits, this focus comes out of a belief that rural America is the primary driver behind Donald Trump"s political base. "Rural Resentment," for example, is the title of an article last week at Slate which, in its own words "discussed how rural dwellers see city folk." 

That"s all well and good, but the rural population in the United States is only a small and shrinking part of the coalition that put Donald Trump in the White House. Moreover, the rural population today, according to Census Data and the Kaiser Family Foundation, comprises only 14 percent of the US population nationwide. 

That is, only 14 percent of Americans live outside a metropolitan area. 86 percent of the population is connected to a metropolitan area, its economy, and its amenities. 

Moreover, rural areas are a shrinking phenomenon, largely because the industries that drive rural settlement — agriculture and natural-resource extraction — are employing fewer and fewer people. 

And today, many states that are often considered to have large rural populations are really overwhelmingly metropolitan states. This is true in Colorado, for example, where 84 percent of the population lives in metropolitan areas. Yes, there are farmers and miners in the state. But more than 8 out of every ten people live near a city. Texas is another state that is far more metropolitan than many people assume, with 92 percent of its population in metropolitan areas. 

If we look at this through a political lens, we see that — while Trump was no doubt helped by voters in rural areas — he couldn"t have won the 2016 election without a lot of help from people living in metropolitan areas. 

In the Dallas-Ft Worth Metroplex, for example, the only county (out of 12) that voted in the majority for Hillary Clinton in 2016 was Dallas County. A plurality of the voters in the 11 other counties voted for Donald Trump. While Dallas County voters delivered 461,000 votes to Hillary Clinton, neighboring Tarrant County alone contributed 345,000 votes to Donald Trump. Nearby Collin County delivered another 200,000 votes to Trump. Once the other 9 metro counties are factored in, we find that Donald Trump rather easily won the metro area overall.

We find a similar phenomenon in the Orlando metro area in Florida. During the 2016 presidential election, only two of the seven counties in the metro area — Orange and Osceola — reported a majority vote for Hillary Clinton. All other counties went for Trump, including populous Lake and Seminole Counties. Overall, Trump won a slight majority in the metro area. 

Yes, Trump handily won in states with relatively high rural populations including Kentucky, and West Virginia. But he also won majorities in states where fewer than 3 out of ten people were rural, including Arizona, Texas, Florida, Utah, and South Carolina. 

Now, it"s important to keep in mind that just because someone lives in a metropolitan area, that doesn"t mean the person lives in a core city.

Urban dwellers only make up part of the metropolitan population. The rest of the metropolitan population is made up of people living in suburbs, or the so-called exurbs out on the fringes of the metro areas. But even those exurban residents often tend to commute closer into the urban core to make a living, to recreate, and to engage in commerce. They"ve very much a part of the metropolitan population. 

Those metropolitan areas that voted in the majority for Donald Trump during the 2016 election were often very suburban in nature. But their populations obviously weren"t rural. Nationwide, Trump won the suburban vote while losing the urban vote handily. The BBC reports: "Mr Trump won the rural vote by 62% to 34% and the suburban vote by 50% to 45%, while Mrs Clinton won the urban vote by 59% to 35%." 

Yes, the differences in voting patters between rural and core-city residents is stark. However, given the relative insignificance of the rural poulation within many states, the political and cultural divide may be better explained by looking to the metro areas themselves. The conflict resides just as much within metro areas where core urban areas tend to vote one way, and suburban areas tend to vote another. 

If we fail to look carefully within the metro areas themselves, we quickly find the information we get is less than illuminating. 

For an illustration of this, we need look no further than two major ballot issues that took place in California over the past 25 years. 

The first was the statewide vote on the infamous Proposition 187 in 1994. This was a ballot measure that would have mandated that public welfare institutions, including public schools, deny taxpayer funded services to illegal immigrants. The ballot measure won easily, garnering 58 percent of the vote. Our modern narrative would have us believe that metro areas voted against the measure while the country folk in the rural areas voted for it. This however, is not what happened. If we look at a map of the voting results, we find that a majority of the voters in all all metropolitan counties in southern California voted to approve the measure:

Although the vote took place more than 20 years ago, we can hardly say that a large rural population in 1990s California was skewing California to the "yes" side on this issue. California was already a thoroughly metropolitan state by the 1990s, and the overwhelming majority or residents lived in the metropolitan areas of California. 

We can also see similar voting patterns within the last ten years, with Proposition 8. 2008"s Proposition 8 was a ballot measure that banned government sanctioned same-sex marriage in the state. It passed with 52 percent of the vote. As with Proposition 187, we can see that the measure received significant support within metropolitan areas. Indeed, with the exception of Santa Barbara County, all southern California counties — including the heavily metropolitan areas of Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties — voted in favor of the measure:

Once again, we find that the urban-rural divide fails to provide a sufficient explanation for cultural and political divisions in the United States. It is often stated that California is characterized by conflict between big cities on the coast and the more rual interior. A more accurarate assessment would have to include very real conflicts within the metro areas themselves. 

This Suburban Population is Growing

The metropolitan population in the United States continues to grow, but only some of that growth is going to core cities. 

Hipsters and leftist pundits like to predict a future when everyone will live in shimmering skyscrapers and take light rail to work. But so far, no data suggests this future will be arriving any time soon. Pro-suburb researcher Joel Kotkin often says as much, and last year Kotkin and Wendell Cox wrote: 

The suburbs, intoned The Atlantic a few years back, were where “the American dream goes to die.”

In reality, the census estimates released this month reveal a very different story, both here in Southern California and nationwide. Rather than becoming more urban, the country continues to become more suburban, with less-dense areas and regions gaining more population than their inner-city cousins.

Indeed, rather than exiting to the city, people are actually doing the exact opposite: heading to both the suburbs and the sprawling cities of the Sun Belt. Overall, suburban populations are growing faster in all but a handful of metropolitan areas. The perceived “historic shift” toward the urban core — based, in part, on two years of slightly higher core growth in the wake of the housing bust — has now reverted to its traditional path of dispersion.

The new numbers tell us something that was already evident to anyone who bothered to follow the recent U.S. Census Bureau reports, which once again follow well-established pathways. Since 2012, suburban and exurban counties have again grown faster than the urban ones; and this does not even account for the fact that suburbs and exurbs already constitute a much larger part of the U.S. population — seven times the population of urban cores in metropolitan areas over 1,000,000 population.

This isn"t to say that no one"s moving to the core urban areas. There are still plenty of people doing that. But, it would be a grave mistake to assume that, as rural areas continue to disappear, urban core dwellers are all that are left in their wake. 

The truth is far more complicated, and the urban/suburban divide will continue to be an important part of American politics and American economic theory well into the future. 

Tying one"s political and ideological fortunes to the rural population is clearly a grave error. With an aging population — barring some major changes in technology and logistics — the countryside will continue to empty over the next 20 years. (As the Spanish experience shows, this isn"t just an American phenomenon either.) 

Suburban metropolitan populations, on the other hand, are likely to continue to grow for any number of reasons. This does suggest, however, continued conflict over state- and federal-level government spending, urban planning, and a host of other issues where urbanites and suburbanites attempt to use state and federal government institution to assert themselves over the other side. 

State governments, especially, will continue to be battlefields where politicians from small, high-population urban areas will attempt to set policy for vast swaths of urban and suburban areas of each state as dueling majorities fight each other in the state legislatures.

It"s likely that the American media will continue to run stories that attempt to understand "rural resentment" and the rural voters who voted for Donald Trump. For the average journalist, these people must seem exotic, unknowable, and possibly worthy of study like animals in a zoo.  But, if the media class is looking for a more convenient way to take a look at "the other side," they often need look no further than the suburban county next door.

Two More Major Problems For Social Security & Medicare

Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

Not too long ago my step-dad had to spend a few days in intensive care. Pretty scary stuff.

He had just about every nasty symptom imaginable, from constant vomiting to dizziness to ultra-high fever, but the doctors couldn’t figure out why.

Fortunately his condition improved enough that he was released from the hospital, and now he’s on the mend.

Now, my step-dad is a Medicare patient. But he just found out that he’s been unceremoniously dropped by his Primary Care doctor.

Apparently his physician dropped all of her Medicare patients in one giant culling.

It turns out that physicians across the country have been firing Medicare patients; and according to a late 2015 study from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 21% of physicians are not taking new Medicare patients.

Much of this trend is based on stiff penalties and financial disincentives from the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and 2015’s Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization (MACRA) Act.

MACRA in particular is completely mystifying.

The law created a whopping 2,400 pages of regulations that Medicare physicians are expected to know and follow.

Many of the rules are debilitating.

For instance, MACRA changed how physicians can be reimbursed for their Medicare patients by establishing a bizarre set of standards to determine if a physician is providing “value”.

As an example, if a patient ends up in the emergency room, his or her physician can incur a steep penalty.

This explains why my step-dad was dropped by his doctor.

The healthcare system has been broken to the point that physicians now have a greater incentive to fire their Medicare patients than to treat them.

One Florida-based physician summed up the situation like this:

“I have decided to opt-out of Medicare, acknowledging that I can no longer play a game that is rigged against me; one that I can never win because of constantly changing rules, and one where the stakes include fines and even potential jail time.”

The irony is that all these new laws and regulations were designed to “save” Medicare.

As we’ve discussed many times before, both Medicare and Social Security are dramatically underfunded and rapidly running out of cash.

Medicare is the worst off between the two; MACRA and Obamacare were supposed to create hundreds of billions of dollars in cost savings.

It’s clear now that this cost savings comes at the expense of physicians… and the result is a rising trend in Medicare patients being dropped.

But even with the cost savings, the Congressional Budget Office projects that Medicare will become completely INSOLVENT by 2026.

As I write this letter, Congress is already taking steps to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

If they finish the job, all the supposed cost savings will be eliminated, and Medicare’s projected insolvency date will be accelerated to 2021.

So the government must either keep legislation that isn’t working and have Medicare run out of money in 2026… or repeal the legislation and have Medicare run out of money in 2021.

Either way, Medicare is toast.

Oh, and bailing out Medicare isn’t an option either.

They would need TRILLIONS of dollars to fully fund Medicare, which is just about impossible for a government that loses hundreds of billions each year and already has a $20 trillion debt.

I’m not suggesting they’ll let Medicare go bust.

More than likely they’ll just come up with some band-aid fix that has terrible consequences.

For example, they could bail out Medicare by stealing from Social Security.

Bear in mind that Social Security is a total mess.

Back in the 1960s there were nearly 6.5 active workers paying into the system for every Social Security recipient.

Today that worker-to-beneficiary ratio has fallen by nearly half.

There simply aren’t enough workers paying into the system to support the swelling number of retirees.

That’s why Social Security is terminally underfunded.

And stealing from its trust funds to support Medicare would merely accelerate the demise of Social Security.

Again, there are no good options to save these programs.

But you can easily take charge of your own health and retirement, and there are plenty of solutions available.

Sure, if Social Security and Medicare are still around when it comes time for you to collect, great.

But you’ll be a LOT more secure, for example, if you set up a robust, flexible retirement structure like a solo 401(k) or self-directed IRA.

These allow you to contribute MUCH more money to your retirement, cut costs, and invest in a variety of asset classes that could produce superior returns.

Even just a 1% improvement in your net returns could boost your retirement savings by hundreds of thousands of dollars when compounded over 20-40 years.

A well-structured retirement plan could even own something like an e-commerce business, where not only the profits, but even the investment returns on those profits, would accumulate tax-free towards your retirement.

There are better options in healthcare as well.

Clearly no insurance plan can substitute for healthy food, good choices, and plenty of exercise.

But it’s amazing how much cheaper high quality care and medication can be if you expand your thinking overseas.

Countries like Canada, Mexico, Thailand, India, etc. are renowned for medical tourism.

Whatever treatment you require, from cancer to fertility, top-tier facilities are available abroad at a fraction of the price, and you can actually be treated like a respected human being.

And the cost savings in treatment is often vastly higher than any travel costs in getting there.

(You’d think Medicare would encourage going abroad for treatment…)

Social Security and Medicare are both finished. The numbers don’t lie, and even the annual trustee reports tell us that they’re pitifully underfunded.

But the good news is you don’t need the government to retire and be healthy.

There are plenty of solutions available to take back control for yourself. It just requires a little bit of education and the will to act.

Do you have a Plan B?

Obama Accuses Sanders Supporters Of Undermining Obamacare

With the Obamacare repeal process having officially started (the replacement of the Affordable Care Act is a different matter entirely, and will likely take years to be enacted), outgoing president Obama is watching his biggest legacy slowly melt before his eyes, and has started to point fingers. One unexpected place where he is casting blame is criticism from the far left wing of his own Democratic Party which he says helped feed into the unpopularity of Obamacare.

At a town hall event with Vox Media, Obama acknowledged the politics have been stacked against his reforms, mainly blaming Republicans who he said refused to help make legislative fixes to Obamacare, which provides subsidies for private insurance to lower-income Americans who do not have healthcare plans at work. But Obama also said Liberals like former Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders had contributed to the program"s unpopularity according to Reuters.

During Sanders" campaign for the presidential nomination, he proposed replacing Obamacare with a government-run single-payer health insurance system based on Medicare, the government plan for elderly and disabled Americans.

"In the "dissatisfied" column are a whole bunch of Bernie Sanders supporters who wanted a single-payer plan," Obama said in the interview.

"The problem is not that they think Obamacare is a failure. The problem is that they don"t think it went far enough and that it left too many people still uncovered," Obama said.

Ironically Sanders believes that Obama did not go far enough in finalizing the law which is viewed unfavorably by more Americans than those who have a favorable view of Obamacare.

Michael Briggs, a spokesman for Sanders, agreed that many people would rather the government "take on the private insurance industry and the pharmaceutical companies" and play a bigger role in providing healthcare.

"There are many millions of Americans, including many of Bernie"s supporters, who don’t understand why we are the only major country on earth that does not provide healthcare as a right and they don’t understand why we pay more but get less for what we spend on healthcare," Briggs said.

Polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation last month showed 46 percent of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Obamacare, while 43 percent have a favorable view. Americans are also split on whether the law should be repealed.

As noted previously, Trump and congressional Republicans have vowed to quickly repeal the law, but Obama and Democrats have argued they should reveal a replacement plan before dismantling the program.

While the White House is adamant that more than 20 million previously uninsured Americans gained health coverage through Obamacare, the outcome has been one of soaring costs while services rendered have deteriorated. Coverage was extended by expanding the Medicaid program for the poor and through online exchanges where consumers can receive income-based subsidies.

Obama has been spending part of his last two weeks in office urging supporters to speak out against plans by Republicans - who will soon control both the White House and Congress - to dismantle the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

Last week the Senate official launched the process of repealing Obamacare.