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You might say that the federal social safety net increases people’s incomes but doesn’t create jobs. But that’s not true. Social Security supports consumer spending, which creates jobs in retail and more. Medicare and Medicaid support jobs in hospitals, doctors’ offices, and so on. West Virginia may still think of itself as a coal-mining state, but by the numbers it has long been more accurately described as a health care state, with much of its employment ultimately driven by those federal dollars:
FRED
I guess that there are some people who don’t think of employment in hospitals, or in the service sector more generally, as “real” jobs; I don’t think nurses and schoolteachers would agree.
What is true, and may partially explain political rage in left-behind regions, is that many of the jobs federal aid creates tend to be female-coded, certainly more so than coal mining — which may in turn explain why the problem of adults without jobs appears to be worse, at least in terms of its political weight, for men than for women.
That said, the Biden-Harris administration has been making a serious effort to promote manufacturing as part of its
industrial policies — an effort that seems to be disproportionately helping heartland states.
The odd thing is that the politicians angry heartland voters support — Trump received more than
twice as many votes in West Virginia as Joe Biden in 2020 — oppose the very programs that aid these depressed areas. Trump tried, in effect, to kill the Affordable Care Act. Not a single Republican voted for the Inflation Reduction Act, which is helping to create manufacturing jobs in the heartland.
But then Adam Tooze, who does know something about German political economy,
tells us that while the AfD talks a lot about “social distress” in lagging regions, this “does not translate into a platform that supports greater state spending.”
In Germany as in America, then, voters in left-behind regions are, understandably, angry — and they channel this anger into support for politicians who will make their plight worse.
Quick hits:
Will the rise of the AfD
doom eastern Germany’s economy?
Clean energy investments are going
mainly to red states.
Trump’s advantage on economic issues
appears to be fading.
A tech-driven regional divide?