Weekend Reading: I saw this in Kansas City, of all places—where, IIRC, one firm dropped out of funding the Chamber of Commerce because it was going on roadshows outside trying to attract jobs to the region. It thought more mployers might force it to pay higher wages: Monica Potts: In the Land of Self-Defeat https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/opinion/sunday/trump-arkansas.html: "What a fight over the local library in my hometown in rural Arkansas taught me about my neighbors’ go-it-alone mythology—and Donald Trump’s unbeatable appeal.... I returned to Van Buren County at the end of 2017 after 20 years.... I’ve realized that it is true that people here think life here has taken a turn for the worse. What’s also true, though, is that many here seem determined to get rid of the last institutions trying to help them, to keep people with educations out, and to retreat from community life and concentrate on taking care of themselves and their own families. It’s an attitude that is against taxes, immigrants and government, but also against helping your neighbor.... I realized this after a fight over, of all things, our local library.... The library board wanted to increase the pay it could offer a new head librarian, who would be combining her new job with an older one, to 25 an hour.... The library has historically provided a variety of services for this community. It has offered summer reading camps for children and services like high-speed internet, sewing classes and academic help. I grew up going to the library and visited it often when I returned. It was always busy. I thought people would be supportive. Instead, they started a fight.... The first comment came from Amie Hamilton, who reiterated her point when I interviewed her several months later. 'If you want to make 25 an hour, please go to a city that can afford it', she wrote. 'We the people are not here to pay your excessive salaries through taxation or in any other way'. There was general agreement among the Facebook commenters that no one in the area was paid that much... and the people who do actually earn incomes that are similar—teachers and many county officials—largely remained quiet.... When a few of us, including me, pointed out that the candidate for the library job had a master’s degree, more people commented on the uselessness of education. 'Call me narrow-minded but I’ve never understood why a librarian needs a four-year degree', someone wrote. 'We were taught Dewey decimal system in grade school. Never sounded like anything too tough'.... The library fight was, itself, a fight over the future of rural America, what it meant to choose to live in a county like mine, what my neighbors were willing to do for one another, what they were willing to sacrifice to foster a sense of community here. The answer was, for the most part, not very much...

...Van Buren gave Mr. Trump 73 percent of its vote.... People are leaving rural areas for cities because that’s where the jobs are.... Many rural counties are also experiencing declines in whatever industries were once the major employers. In Appalachia, this is coal; in much of the Midwest, it is heavy manufacturing; and in my county, and many other counties, it’s Natural Gas and other extractive industries. This part of Arkansas sits on the Fayetteville Shale, which brought in natural gas exploration in the early 2000s. For about a decade, the gas companies paid local taxes on their property, equipment and the money they made from extracting natural gas, and landowners paid property taxes on the royalties they earned. It was a boom. Many people at the time, here and elsewhere, expected that the money would last longer than it did. Instead, the price of natural gas plummeted in 2009 and profits declined. Production slowed. One of the biggest natural gas companies in the area, Houston-based Southwestern Energy, stopped paying taxes to the counties here, arguing that the rates were unfair. The company and five Arkansas counties, including mine, are still locked in litigation over some of the money it owes (it recently paid a portion of it).... When local economies are flagging, state governments don’t step in to help as much as they once did....

The fight over the pay for the new head librarian had a larger context: The library moved into a new building, with new services, in 2016. Construction began during the natural gas boom years, and ended after the bust, just as the county budget was being squeezed and services were being cut. During the boom, the new building had seemed necessary, but with the revenue decreases, the county knew it was going to have a hard time paying the 2.1 million still owed on it. (Disclosure: My mother was on the library board when some of the decisions about the new building were made.) The library made its own budget cuts, but the savings weren’t enough to cover the shortfall in paying for the building, and there was a real danger of the library closing, leaving its new, hulking brick building empty. The people who didn’t frequent the library argued that the community didn’t really need it anymore, anyway. After all, if you have internet, you can get whatever you want in a day. Such was the situation when the pay raise showed up on the Quorum Court agenda. Why give one person a raise when the county was slashing its budget, when we were going without so much else? The head librarian candidate, Andrea Singleton, eventually took the job at the old salary, just over $19 an hour, although at first the fight made her upset enough to consider leaving. “It was enough to make me want to run away,” Ms. Singleton, who had been on the library’s staff for four years when she was offered the promotion, told me. “But I got over it.”...

Ms. Hamilton, the Facebook commenter, told me that the voters fixed the county’s problems by electing Republicans to countywide offices in 2018, including Mr. James, who replaced a Democrat who’d held the office for four terms. “Some people are more fiscally responsible than others,” she said. Ms. Hamilton, who is 52, had moved to the county during the natural gas boom, in 2008, and continued working with that industry even after it left. She commutes each week to work in... Midland-Odessa.... She noted that Clinton is a small town and simply couldn’t afford the luxury of government services. “If you’re looking for a handout, this is not the place; we can’t support that,” Ms. Hamilton said. Mr. Widener... was born in... Conway, home to the University of Central Arkansas. He commutes there for work in the university’s information technology department. He told me the idea of paying the librarian $25 an hour was “typical government waste.” He added, “It’s the same thing in Washington.” The typical private-sector wage in Van Buren, $10 to $13 an hour, was right for the county, many people said. Anything more than that was wasteful, or evidence of government corruption....

Almost everyone I spoke with feels that the county overspent during the gas boom years, and that the bill is coming due. “We got wasteful and stupid, and now we have to go back to common sense,” Corrine Weatherly, who owns a dress- and costume-making shop, Sew What, told me. Ms. Weatherly also runs the county fair, and so she shows up to almost every Quorum Court meeting.... Ms. Hamilton told me she’d witnessed, in Texas, a hospital being practically bankrupted by the cost of caring for immigrants and said, “I don’t want my tax dollars to be used to pay for people that are coming here just to sit on a government ticket.” Mr. Widener, who described himself as “more libertarian” than anything else, told me his heart goes out to migrant children who are held in detention centers at the border, but he blames the parents who brought them to this country. Where I see needless cruelty, my neighbors see necessary reality....

Many of those who want to live in a place with better schools, better roads and bigger public libraries have taken Ms. Hamilton’s suggestion—they’ve moved to places that can afford to offer them. This includes many of my peers from high school.... Phillip Ellis, who was chosen to be chairman of the library board right before the controversies began, thought the outrage about the potential tax increase was more about philosophy than actual numbers. “I think it’s just anti-tax anything,” he said. He recounted some of the complaints people in the county had made to him about the proposed increase. “They’d say, ‘So-and-so has a big farm and they may not even use the library,’” he recalled. He would tell them, “Well, I don’t have children and never use the school.” With that sort of mentality, he said, “no one will do anything.”... Many other counties have turned to sales taxes as property taxes dwindle: It means that people who stop to shop when they’re passing through pay it as well, but it’s also a tax that tends to fall harder on lower-income households....

Economic appeals are not going to sway any Trump voters, who view anyone who is trying to increase government spending, especially to help other people, with disdain, even if it ultimately helps them, too. And Trump voters are carrying the day here in Van Buren County.... As long as Democrats make promises to make their lives better with free college and Medicare for all sound like they include government spending, these voters will turn to Trump again—and it won’t matter how many scandals he’s been tarnished by...

#orangehairedbaboons #weekendreading #2019-10-05