Read Anthony Flaccovento’s “Working People Everywhere Need A Rural New Deal” at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. Here’s a teaser:

A Rural New Deal is urgently needed to help revitalize small towns and rural communities. That should be good news enough. But the added good news is that the policies and actions contained in the Rural New Deal will help working people in cities and suburbs as well. We’ll explore the particulars in a moment, but first some important background.

For most of the past five decades, small towns and rural communities have witnessed a steady erosion of their economies, along with a sharp increase in health problems, addiction, housing shortages, and the loss of population, including many young people looking for opportunities elsewhere. This didn’t just happen. It’s been a bipartisan, four-decade long betrayal of working folks, enabled by investor-driven trade deals like NAFTA, trickle-down tax and economic policies, and the near-abandonment of antitrust enforcement. Taken together, these policies—along with disinvestment in rural communities and one-time factory towns—have concentrated wealth and pulled the rug out from under workers, farmers, community banks, and small businesses. Recent trends, like the buying up of housing stock, land, and local physicians’ practices by private equity giants, is only accelerating the extraction and transfer of wealth from those who actually produce it to those who make money from trading, downsizing, or even eliminating the businesses.

The need for investment in infrastructure as well as local leadership and capacity is particularly critical to create good jobs and strong businesses in rural and working-class communities. While some characterize rural communities and red states as the primary beneficiaries of federal dollars, this is only partly true and overlooks key investment gaps in these places. Rural communities tend to receive more net federal dollars for two reasons: In general, they have more low-income people and more older people than cities and suburbs. As a result, higher per capita levels of federal money, in the form of Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicare, and Social Security flow to these regions. More disability funds, whether Black Lung or Social Security Disability payments, are also transferred to people in these communities, but that’s in large part because the jobs available skew toward the physically demanding and, too often, the dangerous and debilitating.

Where former factory towns and rural communities lack substantial and sustained investment is in the things that help them build long-term prosperity and higher levels of self-sufficiency: value-adding infrastructure (for example for food, fisheries, forest, and fiber enterprises), broadband, workforce development that meets emerging demands, and individual and organizational capacity to secure investment and drive bottom up, locally based solutions to their needs and problems. Studies from the Kellogg Foundation, USDA, and others document the dramatically lower levels of per capita investment of this sort in rural America as compared with urban investments.

More here.