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What the Mississippi Water Crisis Says About America - The New York Times [1]
['Paul Krugman']
Date: 2022-09-01
Then the relative progress stalled. In fact, by some measures, Mississippi began to fall behind again; for example, life expectancy in the United States as a whole rose about seven years between 1980 and 2015 but increased only three years in Mississippi.
We have a pretty good idea of what happened after 1980. The most likely story is that as America increasingly became a knowledge-based economy, high-value economic activities — and skilled workers — gravitated toward metropolitan areas with good amenities and highly educated work forces. Places like Mississippi, which had relatively few college-educated workers in 1980 and fell further behind over time, found themselves on the losing end of this change.
There are no easy answers to the problem of left-behind regions. But one thing is for sure: Imagining that tax cuts will bring prosperity to a poorly educated state that can’t even provide its capital with running water is just delusional.
Which brings us to the political trends that lie behind these delusions.
Since Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party has been dominated by anti-government ideology. As the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist famously put it, the goal was to shrink government to the point that you could “drown it in the bathtub.” When Donald Trump ran for president, it briefly seemed as if the G.O.P. might make a break with that ideology, accepting the social safety net while focusing on ethnic and racial hostility.
Instead, however, Republicans, believing that they can win elections by riling up the base with social issues like attacks on wokeness, have doubled down on right-wing economics. Congressional candidates are once again talking about repealing Obamacare and privatizing Social Security.
And Republican-run states have gone beyond cutting social programs to eviscerating public services Americans have taken for granted for many generations, services like public education — and drinkable water.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/01/opinion/jackson-mississippi-water-shortage.html
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