The city of Baltimore has gotten a lot of attention, which has an urban population and which has sections that are plagued with poverty. But hardship is not restricted to a single ethnicity or race. In fact, some of the poorest states and counties are those linked to a dying coal industry and they are comprised of a struggling underclass.
A changing economy has been a painful transition for coal country and especially the Appalachian region. Its people are sicker, live fewer years and have less opportunity for upward mobility, thinking instead that they could spend their lives working in the mines. The resulting destitution has led to drug addiction, and despair. And the question now is what to do?
“Counties with higher poverty and unemployment rates generally had higher rates of opioid sales and Medicare opioid prescriptions, as well as drug overdose deaths and opioid-related hospitalizations,” says the U.S. Health and Human Services. It adds that there was a 200% increase in overdoses between 2000 and 2014, and 60,000 drug overdoses in 2016 alone.
While the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that tougher oversight of opioids has resulted in fewer prescriptions, they are still dispensed at three times the rate two decades ago. And the poor white neighborhoods had 9.6 deaths per 100,000 people — more than any other race or ethnicity, it added.
In West Virginia alone, The Charleston Gazette-Mail says that 21 million such pills were distributed in the state’s southern portion between 2006 and 2016, or 70,000 for each person living there. That’s where the Great Recession and the corresponding downfall of coal has been the most devastating.
Using poverty level, unemployment rates and median incomes as a yard stick, roadsnacks.net ranked the poorest states: Mississippi, New Mexico, Alabama, Louisiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Arkansas, Georgia and North Carolina. Meantime, 24/7 Wall Street looked at the poorest counties in the country by factoring in poverty, education and life expectancy. It found Kentucky and West Virginia, both in the heart of Appalachia, had their fair share, along with counties in the southern part of the country and the Native American reservations.
‘Everything is Possible’
In an earlier talk with this writer, Ed Kornish, who is the prosecuting attorney in McDowell County, West Virginia and a West Point graduate, said that the good-ole days in the once-bustling coal county are gone. Today, McDowell is a shell of its old self, leaving many of its citizens hopeless and addicted to opioids. What now?
Let’s look at the facts: 792 coal plants have closed since 2010 while 487 are still running, says the Sierra Club. But S&P Global Market Intelligence estimates that about 85 more coal plants will retire before 2023. Solar and wind energy jobs, meantime, are booming and outpacing those in the coal industry. And all of this is in the context of cheap and abundant natural gas, which is also cleaner and it is replacing most of the coal plants.
So when candidate Trump came to West Virginia and told a crowd of adoring fans that “we are going to put those miners back to work (and) we’re going to get those mines open,” he won their confidence and their votes. Now, though, nearly three years into the Trump administration, coal is on an unyielding decline: 24% of the electricity pie compared to more than half of it in 2005.
If one concludes that coal will never return to the prominence it once had, then there are two solutions: The first is to let its citizens vote with their feet — to leave the state and to find work and prosperity in regions that are awash with jobs. The second is to create empowerment zones and to invest public wealth in rural America — much like the Green New Deal would do.
James Fallows, former speech writer for President Carter and now an author and writer for the Atlantic, says that the United States was primarily an agrarian economy in the 1880s but that today, farmers are less than 2% of the population. Appalachia, meantime, had peak coal employment in 1918 and now that number — in West Virginia — is 10,000 to 13,000 miners.
In an exchange via Twitter, Fallows told this reporter that while things look dour in West Virginia, “everything is possible.” For his part, the journalist has traveled the four corners of the country and examined closely rural American life, discovering how once despondent areas have reinvigorated themselves.
In its simplest form, it is a combination of private initiative and public investment. It is about using the strengths of a given area and then working hard to recruit tailor-made businesses to that region with public incentives. In West Virginia’s case, it sits atop the Marcellus Shale basin, perhaps the country’s richest natural gas deposit and the envy of every manufacturer that needs access to that fuel.
It would be a better ending than the current plight, which is producing poverty, despair and opioid addiction. Economic hardship is not limited to Baltimore. It is omnipresent and pervasive, expanding from urban America to the rural regions and affecting all those in its path, regardless of color.
