Comment by sellmesoap
17 days ago
I think a lot of it comes down to the rural/urban divide, in a rural setting there's a lot less convinence, fewer services. A need to be more self suficcient. While urban settings have many amenities and services, they also tend to be hotspots for mental illness, crime, lack of housing for those who don't or can't make enough money to afford increasing rent and food costs, it's harder to police (more resources needed) illness from concentrated pollution. Theres some who see the conservative side of politics as fiscally conservative, and the liberal side aiming for more social support. This is a gross simplification of U.S. politics (I'm Canadian, we have a rural divide as well, take a look at how the urban Canadian centres vote vs rural, the difference is our party colours are backwards to yours!) So many rural folks see the tax bill and say "what do I get for this" and many urban folks see the need for stricter regulations, more social support etc. And say "We need more resources, let's throw money at the problem". Coming from a small town if you see someone in need it's not too burdensom to lend a hand, in a dense urban situation it's neccesary to turn your back on the many individuals and say this is a social problem that is more comfortable to abstract to the government to handle. Now subsides for farmers seem weird from my vantage point. On one hand the scale of operations for a farmer do seem lofty compared to my experience as an individual earner, I don't have to budget for sub $1M equipment upkeep/replacement etc. But on the other I'm not beyond considering "conspiracy theroies" like "sugar makes us more susceptable to influance, and lowers immune response, leading to higher healthcare costs" - bassically we are the product not the customer.
More importanly there's a rift between "I care" and "I'm paid to care" that's common for social support, just like it's common for the tech industry.
All this is an over simplification, but I'd love for us to do better as a whole. I think that starts with people using their empathy and curiosity to understand the divide. Maybe through understanding we can be less judgemental of each other and find ways to work together, or at least understand and build boundaries to make the divide more livable.
In the US money tends to be distributed from more populated regions to less populated regions. The idea that rural americans oppose social spending because they don't have access to these programs is false.
It does seem that they are often unaware of the the social spending on them. Some of it is surely economy of scale: it's diffuse so everything costs more. Delivery of social services is much more efficient in urban settings, and its failures make the news.
The huge bulk of social spending is in the form of direct payments or reimbursements. Medicaid, disability, snap. That stuff. I don't buy that this is much more efficient in urban settings.
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Subsidies for farmers ensure surplus capacity. Lead times are long and you can't risk even a temporary failure. So you spend more money than current supply and demand would justify.
I agree farming is key to our survival, it's likely that failure in surplus has a knock on effect seen more in the export market then in the first world. But aside from that do we need so much HFCS and soy products? I've heard they both get a big subsidy specifically. I'm biased as I have food sensitivities to both, but I know there's a debate over their value as food products, and their health effects, soy protein isolate is for newspapers not burgers!
Perhaps a need to be self sufficient in a subset of possible ways. My criticism is they are self sufficient in the highly visible ways that indicate identity and matter to that individual. When we consider ways that impact other humans, the full picture is revealed.
>A need to be more self suficcient.
The thing is, while most people in rural lands think they are self sufficient, they still depend on technology and government services plenty, as well as money coming in. But yet they are on the high horse of thinking they don't need any of that. Until that changes, they aren't going to change their mind.
>I think that starts with people using their empathy and curiosity to understand the divide.
Nope. This has been the democratic approach for ages, and the right takes full advantage of the "weak" left. A lot of current bullshit could have been avoided if the Democrats went hard on MAGA instead of trying to unite the country and prosecuted Trump for insurrection to the full extent.
Its time for the complete opposite. People need to get scared again of getting a beating in public, or worse, if they voice their bullshit opinion.
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