Op-ed: should metro America subsidize rural America?

The editorial board of The Roanoke Times offers a compelling editorial on why metropolitan areas of the United States should invest funding in rural America. It's a great take on the issue from a paper that has produced some of the best editorials and commentary on this topic of any metro paper.

When they write about the lagging economy of southwestern Virginia, the editorial board notes that they sometimes get off-the-record comments from people who say that maybe spending more money on rural America, especially the Appalachian coalfields, is a waste of resources and that the area's residents should simply relocate to more economically stable areas. More recently, Jackson Kernion, a grad student instructor at the University of California-Berkeley got widespread attention by arguing such viewpoints (which devolved into frank rural-bashing) with conservative outfit Campus Reform on Twitter.

"Those responses are uniformly dispassionate ones based on a cold-eyed reading of the bottom line — the costs of subsidizing rural America is simply too high. And let’s be clear: Metro America does subsidize rural America. We don’t like to think of it that way, of course. Those of us who grew up in, or live in, rural America like to think of ourselves as independent and self-sufficient," the board writes, but notes that that's mostly untrue. Rural schools in Virginia, for example, are largely funded by the state and federal governments because rural areas couldn't afford public schools otherwise.

Moreover, "traditional employers in rural and small-town America have been disappearing, while the jobs being created in the new economy are increasingly concentrated in metro areas," the board writes. "Over the past two decades, the United States gained jobs. Yet two-thirds of the counties in the country lost jobs because the job growth was concentrated in a handful of favored metros. That trend is accelerating, too."

Neither Republicans nor Democrats seem to want to talk about the problem because it's not clear how to solve it. When Georgetown University adjunct policy professor Brad Blakeman discussed Kernion's tweets on Fox News, he said that "cities need to take care of their own" because "rural America is doing just great." Though the editorial board disagrees that rural America is doing fine, they note that Blakeman inadvertently defended Kernion with his comment about cities taking care of their own.

"Kernion at least sees a connection between metro America and rural America — and doesn’t like it. Blakeman wants to see the two as unrelated islands. He’s wrong about that and Kernion is wrong, too, but in a different way," the board writes. "We’re all Americans. We’re all in this together. We should all look out for each other and we should do what we can to make sure we all have the same opportunities. It shouldn’t matter what our skin color is, or what religion we practice, or who we love, or anything else. And it shouldn’t matter where we live, either."