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Waaah our town is dying! Why don't any young folks want to stay here?

many residents in this deeply Republican town say they view Trump as having a better vision for salvaging rural America

The town I was born in is dying and its been going on since I was a kid. They were a wood mill town with three plants. They have made every bad decision that they could make. Turned down a paper mill and college before I was born. Turned down two manufacturing plants and a wal-mart after I was born. Consistently resisted chain restaurants and stores even after I had grown up and left. Then the world changed, manufacturing and new opportunities dried up completely and they still cling to the old way of doing things because they can't see they are the problem.

Now its just a shell full of empty lots and rotting houses. The local mayor is still associated with the old families but still is only interested in protecting what they have. They keep getting elected and the place continues to deteriorate. In their minds its due to people like me leaving and all the poor and their children who are still clinging to bones of that town. Not their fault though. How could it be? They are better than everyone else.

This is the state of far too many small towns in the US today.

They say neither Pennsylvania nor the nation can afford to lose small towns and the institutions that power them.

Lol, why?

Not only are they a touchstone of American life,

Very often a hard and poverty stricken life.

but they are also key to driving certain sectors of the economy, like agriculture.

What's stopping farms from being built next to suburbs or even within cities with the tech we have now.

These boomers are why over romanticizing how "good" small town life was. What they're really sad about is disproportionate political power our anti democratic electoral college gave them and the unchecked tin pot dictatorships they often held over small towns. Being able to get away with literal murder sometimes because they personally knew the cops and judges.

They couldn't care less about the poor quality of life that most citizens of these small towns had. If they did they would have made the necessary investments to attract people (like a handful of small towns have).

This rural Pennsylvania town could get a huge population boom if they had a "we welcome queer people and migrants and we don't tolerate hate" policy they announced to the world.

But of course, that's way too far for them.

The 1% can make their own wage slaves

The town I grew up in is in the middle of a cancer cluster. The largest factory (where most people work) got caught illegally dumping chemicals in the ground. They were just made to pay a relatively small fine. The corporation was threatening to move the plant somewhere else if it became too expensive to operate there, and all lawsuits were dismissed.

That factory, and most other factories in the area primarily just hire "temp" workers that they keep as temps for years, never actually hire them full time, and pay them near minimum wage with no benefits. Many young people who do end up staying in that area become drug addicts and die in their 20s or 30s.

There's a lot of corruption in the local government and police as well. The police harass anybody they don't like, and they know pretty much who everybody is and what they drive. A few people in government got caught embezzling money. A sheriff tried to frame somebody for murder. Also, I think the people in the courts have some kind of deal with the juvenile detention center, because they give kids very long sentences for minor things (6 months for being 10 minutes late to school while on probation in my case).

Small towns, in my experience, are shitholes with corrupt and authoritarian local governments, and are exploited by corporations in ways similar to third-world countries.

And yet real estate prices remain at all time highs. Boomers asked for this.