Youngstown, OH in better days.
Ok, this may sound a bit outrageous, but hear me out.
I think we're coming close to experiencing a rural American cull. Not a cull like Stalin's or Hitler's. No, a more subtle and slow cull in which this country sheds people whose lives have stalled: jobless, un-educated, unhealthy.
These human beings live in small towns and lesser metropolises that dot heartland states. Toledo, Peoria, Huntington WV, New Bern NC, Reading PA, Pocatello, Youngstown, Flint, Terre Haute, WallaWalla WA. These towns stopped growing eons ago. They offer nothing to their shrinking population of young people.
Let's look closely at Youngstown per US Census figures.
Population 2016: 64,312 (a 4.4% drop from 2010).
Per-capita income 2015: $15,056.
% of population in poverty: 38.3%
% over 25 w/ bachelor's degree: 11.7%
% under 65 with a disability: 16.8%
Health care/Social Assistance Receipts: $844,000,000
Now if you are a Republican devoted to lower taxes for the "makers" and less government assistance for the "takers", Youngstown is sweet manna from heaven. Cut Education, Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, Medicare, SSDI, etc etc. and watch the boom in Youngstown! Watch as these people leave their creaking homes to get the thousands of jobs that result. Right?
Well no.
Watch these people sink further until their actual lives are in jeopardy. Watch as they suffer medical crises that must go untreated. Watch as they struggle feed their children. Watch as their life-expectancy begins to fall. But you won't get to watch because this will all take place while we're watching TV pundits argue about politics as sport. This slow-motion human destruction isn't good TV. It's not the stuff of YouTube "virality".
I figure it will take 5-10 years for the death toll to climb into the hundred thousands. The smallest of these towns will die quickly and completely. The larger ones will be off life-support living in a GOP-induced coma.
Now I shouldn't blame just the Republicans. Democrats often seem just as eager to be tax-cutting fools as their GOP colleagues. But the Republican Party has almost become a single-issue party: cut taxes to kill government.
It is scary that in many of these towns people voted for their own destruction. But I guess they didn't see it that way. I suspect they do believe in the redemptive power of tax cuts. They do trust that rich people will spend their money on capital improvements. They do believe that the coal and steel and auto jobs will come back. They do believe that globalization can be stopped.
Unfortunately, none of those things are true.
Efficient use of resources to cut production and service costs; that's the economic religion the USA. And labor always loses in that scenario.
So we will need less labor not more. We will need fewer people. We will need a cull.