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Anyone living in the Weirton-Steubenville area who read the New York Times Economic Scene column by Eduardo Porter, "Why Big Cities Thrive and Smaller Ones Are Being Left Behind," should be angry at its tone and tenor.
First, because it portrays the local metropolitan area as being mired behind rusting blast furnaces and facing little chance for economic or civic survival. Why the two cities are continually held up as a poster child for the economic downfall of American manufacturing, coal, steel and now small town life itself when so many cities suffer similar fates is the stuff of mystery.
If playing sheer percentages alone, then, yes, it's easy to show the area isn't yet recovering to a permanent unemployment rate below 5 percent as has happened in New York City since the Great Recession. But analyzing unemployment and population figures can tilt the statistics differently.
The Brooke-Hancock-Jefferson three-county area had an estimated population of 119,271 in July 2016. By calculating the total number of unemployed in the area using county-by-county population and unemployment statistics from the federal government, it is possible to show the area has dropped its jobless rate by more than 10 percentage points since the peak of the Great Recession in early 2010, or a more than 60 percent reduction from around 16 percent. New York has "only" cut its unemployment rate by 4.1 percent, or just about half of its 8 percent-plus unemployment rate at the depths of the recession.
It's no more a fair comparison than failing to mention the millions of dollars of investment by a Canadian company literally across the street from the steel mill undergoing site clearing for redevelopment while pronouncing the area as unable to recover.
The second reason for the anger may be something not thought of at first when reading the column, but it would explain the effort to ignore work being done by small towns like Steubenville-Weirton. The datasets and the viewpoint about the death of small-town America is the result of research and analysis by the Brookings Institution think tank, which often sets policy for liberal thinkers in Washington, including those who might want to occupy the Oval Office.
It should be no surprise, then, that the article says areas like Steubenville-Weirton that voted for Donald Trump did so out of frustration, which is never a good idea for policy.
But the conclusion of the column is evidence of just why people who felt ignored and disenfranchised by the government chose one as radical as Trump as president.
The column concludes "the future for small-city America looks dim. Perhaps the best policy would be to help them move to a big city nearby."
That should be frightening to anyone who lives in an American small city. Literally, there is a thought process suggesting that it might be best to simply give up on most of Red State America and relocate the people to the metropolitan areas.
Is this the party of the New Deal and the Great Society, the party that brought us public housing projects, Medicaid, Community Development Block Grants, and a host of other programs aimed at propping up the working class admitting failure to a certain extent? Or is it simply a new way to keep a whole class of people dependent on Mother Government?
It smacks of failed socialist policies, of relocation camps and pacification of the masses.
Small-town America needs to start shouting, loudly, now, before this abandon-the-small-town concept takes root in the election of 2020.