Iowa Property Tax Credit: Fill & Download for Free

Hello Charlene!You always save your toughest questions for me, don’t you young lady…Let’s dive in, shall we?During his State of the Union address to make the case for his re-election a couple of weeks ago, Trump claimed success in delivering on promises, especially the economy.“Unlike so many who came before me, I keep my promises,” Trump said. Did he??Trump will build a great, great wall on our southern border — and I will have Mexico pay for that wall,” Trump vowed after riding down an escalator into the gilded lobby of Trump Tower, “Mark my words.” NO! Promise NOT Delivered!Fact 1: The administration said this month it had built 100 miles of border wall, for instance, but virtually all of that construction has replaced barriers that previously existed during the Obama administration. Mexico hasn’t paid anything and Americans are paying for all changes and new work. AP fact check: Trump exaggerates on jobs, border wall in campaign kickoff rallyFact 2: “Immediately terminate President Obama’s two illegal executive amnesties (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). All immigration laws will be enforced — we will triple the number of ICE agents. Anyone who enters the U.S. illegally is subject to deportation. That is what it means to have laws and to have a country.” NO! Promise NOT Delivered! Trump's tall order: Hiring 15,000 ICE and border patrol agents2. Trump promised annual economic growth of at least 3% on a sustained basis but dangled the possibility of “4, 5, and maybe even 6%.” NO! Promise NOT Delivered!Fact: This hasn’t happened. Unemployment is at a 50-year low, and the economy has expanded an average 2.5% during the first three years of his term, somewhat faster than the 2.2% post-recession average before he took office. The federal tax cuts he spearheaded, along with government spending increases, juiced growth to 2.9% in 2018 but gains slowed to 2.3% in 2019 and are expected to throttle back to slightly less than 2% this year and in 2021. What ever happened to Trump’s boast of 4%, 5% or even 6% growth?3. Tax cuts — Trump vowed the $1.5 trillion in sweeping tax cuts he spearheaded in 2017 wouldn’t increase the federal deficit because they would pay for themselves through faster economic growth that swells government revenue. NO! Promise NOT Delivered!Fact: The tax law is projected to add $1.8 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal budget, but new estimates calculated equal 3.9 trillion will be added to the deficit. What Are the Costs of the Trump Tax Cuts to You?4. Tax cuts — Trump also said the tax cuts would spark a wave of business investment as a result of both lower rates and changes allowing businesses to deduct capital spending more rapidly. NO! Promise NOT Delivered! #PromisesBroken #maga #kag #kag2020Fact: The International Monetary Fund found the legislation did boost investment but by 3.5 percentage points, but that was below the average 5.3 percentage point increase that was forecast. About 80% of the tax savings was channeled into stock buybacks, dividends and other similar activities while just 20% went to capital spending or research and development. Why Stock Buybacks Are Dangerous for the Economy5. “Everybody is getting a tax cut, especially the middle class,” Trump promised when he was a candidate. NO! Promise NOT Delivered!Fact: By 2027 every income group below $75,000 would see a tax increase, while only those income ranges above $75,000 would still see a cut, helping the wealthy and hurting working class folk. A Year After the Middle Class Tax Cut, the Rich Are Winning6. Trade — Trump said a “Trade War with China was easy to win.” NO! Promise NOT Delivered!Fact: At 12:01 a.m. on July 6, 2018 in Washington — noon in Beijing — the United States began imposing tariffs on $34 billion on China and it has escalated up until recently when JUST Phase 1 of a new China Trade deal was signed. This is still nto completely resolved, but dairy farmers in New York, to Poultry Farms in Ohio, to Pig Farms in Iowa have been devastated. US-China trade war is 'unresolvable,' strategist says6. Trump embraced daughter Ivanka Trump’s push for paid family leave when he was running for office. At a campaign stop in Pennsylvania, Trump called for six weeks of paid maternity leave as part of a package of childcare initiatives. NO! Promise NOT Delivered!Fact: That idea went nowhere in Congress. Dead on Arrival! But some 2.1 million civilian federal workers will be eligible for 12 weeks of paid leave after the birth of a child, adoption or the start of foster care under a deal struck last year. Paid family leave for everyone is “not going to happen this year,” Holtz-Eakin said. “That’s something he’s going to have to promise in a second term.” Where does President Trump stand on his 2016 campaign promises?7. Candidate Trump promised Americans he would repeal the Affordable Care Act, the landmark health care reform law enacted under Obama. “Real change begins with immediately repealing and replacing Obamacare. What a mess,” Trump told a crowd at a political rally in Toledo on Oct. 27, 2016. NO! Promise NOT Delivered!Fact: Uhm…. No, that hasn’t happened. 68 times Trump promised to repeal Obamacare8. National security — Failures everywhere. NO! Promise NOT Delivered!Fact 1: His push to oust Venezuela’s president, Nicholas Maduro, has stalled. His negotiations with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un have fizzled. His push for a peace deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan remains out of reach. What’s more, Trump’s recently unveiled Middle East peace plan — years in the making — was dismissed by regional experts as a nonstarter. Trump Releases Mideast Peace Plan That Strongly Favors IsraelFact 2: Instead, Iran has begun to abandon its commitments under the 2015 deal and appears to be inching toward acquiring a nuclear weapon. And while Trump has touted his decision to authorize a deadly strike killing Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the powerful Iranian military leader, it is not clear if that will make Americans safer.Fact 3: Ending forever wars. No, this goal is out of reach. Trump promised in last year’s State of the Union address that he would reduce America’s military presence in the Middle East — repeating his oft-cited campaign pledge. “Our brave troops have now been fighting in the Middle East for almost 19 years,” he said. “Great nations do not fight endless wars.” (1 of 2) No! Promise NOT delivered!Fact 4: But Trump has deployed more American troops to the region, particularly in recent months amid escalating tensions with Iran. After Trump authorized a deadly striking killing Iran’s Soleimani, the president sent an additional 3,000 troops to Kuwait amid increased threat levels in the region. According to the Associated Press, 14,000 U.S. troops have been deployed to the Middle East since May. (2 of 2) NO! Promise NOT Delivered! PolitiFact - McGurk right that Trump has sent 14,000 troops to Middle East since May9. “My agenda will be based on a simple core principle: putting America first,” he said. “Whether it’s producing steel, building cars or curing disease, I want the next generation of production and innovation to happen right here, in our great homeland, America — creating wealth and jobs for American workers. NO! Promise NOT Delivered!Fact: He has NOT put America first and has actively sought to damage and hurt American’s who don’t agree with him. The loss of the SALT deductions for Blue states was aimed at hurting blue states and dividing Americans forcing their taxes higher.10. Trump has said that he isn’t interested in cutting funding for Medicaid. NO! Promise NOT Delivered!Fact: The latest Obamacare repeal-and-replace plan in the Senate does exactly that. Specifically, it cuts Medicaid spending by shifting it to a block grant program and tying annual spending increases to the broadest measure of inflation, rather than healthcare inflation. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 15 million Americans could lose Medicaid coverage by 2026 if this proposal is signed into law by Trump. The CBO says as many as 24 million more Americans could be uninsured under 'Trumpcare'11. Trump said he would supply full funding for Social Security. NO! Promise NOT Delivered!Fact: Trumps first budget took aim at Social Security disability benefits, slashing them by $64 billion. These cuts could strike a big blow to seniors because most SSDI recipients are over age 55, and they’ve been deemed totally disabled and unable to work by the Social Security Administration. Trump to Propose Cuts to Safety Net Once Again12. The U.S. debt stands at $18 trillion when Trump took office and reducing debt “fairly quickly” was a Trump campaign promise. NO! Promise NOT Delivered!Fact: The US National Debt is 24 trillion. U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time Trump said he would ‘eliminate the federal debt in 8 years.” Not happening.13. Trump said he would “create targeted child care tax credits.” NO! Promise NOT Delivered!Fact: Tax bill doesn’t increase deductions for dependent care expenses | December 21, 2017 The Ins and Outs of the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit14. Trump said “We’re going to put our miners back to work” at an August 10, 2016 rally, “They want to be miners, but their jobs have been taken away,” Trump said. Trump also said “we’re going to bring them back, folks.” NO! Promise NOT Delivered!Fact: So far, Trump has brought back 2,000 coal jobs from its high during the Obama Presidency of 90,000 jobs and far from his claim of “bringing back 45,000 new coal mining jobs” falsely claimed in July. Lies. Trump says 'the coal industry is back.' The government's jobs numbers say otherwise15. President Donald Trump promised to revive manufacturing on the campaign trail. “My plan includes a pledge to restore manufacturing in the United States,” Trump said in a campaign rally in Detroit, Mich., on Oct. 31, 2016. NO! Promise NOT Delivered!Fact: Three years in, the industry is on the same trajectory as when he took office. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that jobs have been on a slight uptick, but American manufacturing is still waiting. The Coronavirus will take his toll as well. Has Trump fulfilled his promise to revive US manufacturing? | DW | 05.12.201916. “One of the first things I’d do in terms of executive order, if I win, will be to sign a strong, strong statement that would go out to the country, out to the world, that anybody killing a police man, a police woman, a police officer, anybody killing a police officer, the death penalty is going to happen,” NO! Promise NOT Delivered!Fact: In order for Trump to impose a death penalty for cop killers, he would need to overturn the Supreme Court ruling. Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about.17. Trump said “Allow individuals to fully deduct health insurance premium payments from their tax returns under the current tax system.” He also said “Businesses are allowed to take these deductions, so why wouldn’t Congress allow individuals the same exemptions,” NO! Promise NOT Delivered!Fact: At the end of the day, neither tax credits nor deductions made it through. “There have been no changes to the tax treatment of insurance premiums,” said Urban Institute senior fellow Howard Gleckman. Never followed through, but corporations can deduct these from their taxes. Trump-O-Meter: | PolitiFact18. Trump said he would “Allow individuals to use Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). Contributions into HSAs should be tax-free and should be allowed to accumulate.” NO! Promise NOT Delivered!Fact: There has been no movement. Not in the recently passed tax overhaul, nor anywhere else.19. Trump said “I’m under a routine audit and it’ll be released, and as soon as the audit is finished it will be released” in a May 4, 2018 (And Prior Mentions) discussion with The Economist. NO! Promise NOT Delivered!Fact: We all know by now this NEVER happened, more LIES.20. Trump stated “I would not be a president who took vacations. I would not be a president that takes time off.” In 2015, Trump told The Hill he would not be the type of president to take time off for vacation. Flash forward one year and Trump has watered down that promise, saying he won’t be big on vacations. NO! Promise NOT Delivered!Fact: Barack Obama took 29 vacations from 2009–2017 equaling 328 days. Nearly a third of the days he’s been president, Trump has visited a Trump-branded property on vacation. Trump is on vacation three out of every 10 days. Slightly more: Of the 1,075 days on which he has been president, he has visited Mar-a-Lago or a Trump Something-or-other on 331 of them, 31 percent of the time. Through the New year in 2020, he will have visited a Trump property on 117 days in 2019, the same number as in 2017. This guy doesn’t work and is lazy AF. Glad the #maga #kag #kag2020 approve of this. Trump Golf Count21. Trump Claims End of ‘American Decline’ While Avoiding Mention of Impeachment in State of the Union. Trump stated at the State of the Union on February 4, 2020 that “In just three short years, we have shattered the mentality of American Decline and we have rejected the downsizing of America’s destiny,” NO! Promise NOT Delivered!Fact: This is not true. The country is in 24 trillion dollars of debt, the US has damaged relationship with all its main allies, it has betrayed the trust of other countries we want to build peace with like Palestine, Iran, Cuba, and Iraq, to name a few. The government doesn’t work anymore, its broken, the healthcare system is broken, public education system is broken, the infrastructure all over this country is broken. The country is more divided and factionalized than ever. It is a lie to say the US is not in decline.Trump has only kept 17% of his promises! Trump-O-Meter: Tracking Trump's Campaign Promises He is a complete failure. Promises NOT Delivered! #PromisesBroken What Trump has accomplished is terrible, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and suspending immigration and asylum and we have massive debt and children in cages.Sources: Everyone linked in the text and Donald Trump’s Lies -Promises Broken

Rural towns are generally built around one or maybe two industries other than agriculture.Take my hometown, for example. You basically work in some form of manufacturing, or you’re in dairy and crop farming. Go north a ways to some bigger rivers and it’s dairy farming and paper mills.Every other business basically operates to support those two industries. Dollar General, Shopko, Piggly Wiggly? They provide the basic necessities for people who work in those industries. The specialty shops downtown provide luxury goods for people who work in those industries. The standard Wisconsin small town 2:1 ratio of bars to churches exist to support those industries.The car dealerships don’t sell Priuses and sedans hardly at all; they sell pickup trucks and grocery-getter wagons/SUVs. Mostly used; the only new dealership in my town folded about 15 years ago and both lots are still vacant.A hundred years ago, iron was king in my hometown. It was mostly blast furnaces making iron ore into pig iron and shipping it off to coal country to be made into steel. When the iron mines dried up, it switched mostly to manufacturing.One of the four major manufacturers in the area closed almost 20 years ago now after it got bought up by a west coast equity firm. It wiped out probably a solid 15% of the school district area’s employment. It came at a bad time, as well, in the middle of a recession, so getting other work was pretty hard. Another industry in town laid off 50% of their workforce and automated two product lines.Between transfers and people who had to move out of town to find work, enrollment in the school district dropped a solid 5–10%. My class was large, at around 125. By a decade later, the average class size was down to 80.Automation in the other manufacturing industries has resulted in attrition of jobs there probably by another 50%, though I will seriously credit one of the local employee-owned companies for doing a great job of retaining employees and retraining them for other positions to keep them, which is probably why they’re one of the few manufacturers that has expanded significantly and actually increased overall employment in the last decade. The other manufacturers, not so much.Then there’s agriculture and advances in that field.Here’s what my great-great grandfather started farming with:If you were fast and had a good horse and you worked sunrise to sunset, you could probably plow a 40-acre field in three or four days. Work it down in another two or three. Plant it in another two or three. If the weather cooperated and you worked your horse and your equipment and yourself hard. And the land was already cleared of trees and stumps. You could pull a two-row corn planter.By the time my great-grandfather was ready to start working the farm, my great-great-grandfather was able to put together enough money for one of these:That’s a John Deere unstyled model A. The first one on the farm had steel wheels, not tires. On the other side of this is a flywheel that you had to crank to get it started. It was insanely hard to do. But it didn’t get tired and need water every hour or so like a horse. And it would pull a two bottom plow. You could plow a 40-acre field in a hard day if you had enough light. You could probably do a 4-row corn planter with this.By the time my grandfather was old enough to start working the farm, my great-grandfather had bought this:This is a Ferguson TO-30. It might look smaller than the A, but it’s got more horsepower (26HP), hydraulics, and a three-point hitch. My great-grandfather bought it after the A needed a serious overhaul and the tractor salesman brought out one of these and a Ford 8N, and my great-grandfather said he’d buy whichever one got to the top of a hill with a two-bottom plow faster. The Ferguson won. (We still have the original in the family, plus the replica model the salesman gave him for buying it.)You could plow, work down, and plant a 60-acre field in probably three good days’ work, if you were willing to work into the dark a bit. (My great-grandfather actually specifically ordered the tractor without lights because he believed if you were working into the dark, you were working too long.) Still a 4-row corn planter, but you could probably pull a larger grain drill than the A.By the time my uncle was in high school, the farm was up to this:That’s a Ford 7600 diesel. Almost 100 HP, over three times as much as the Ferguson. This would pull a four-bottom plow. Live PTO, making it possible to run better and better equipment. My family actually sprung for one with a cab because Grandpa was getting older, but he didn’t like it, actually.With the four-bottom, a cultimulcher instead of a disk and drag, an 8-12-row corn planter instead of a 4-row that the Ferguson would pull, you could work a 60–80 acre field in three days if you were nice to the equipment, and probably still get some other stuff done.By the time I was old enough to start really driving around tractors, the neighbors were driving these:That’s a Massey-Ferguson 8220. The neighbors had an 8240, if I recall correctly. I remember when the guys around the corner bought one of these and a chisel plow. 150HP.They worked down an 80 acre field in about two hours and planted it with a 16 row corn planter in about three hours two days later.Today? I have an uncle who does crop and dairy farming. He’s got one tractor with 240 HP that can chisel plow a 120 acre field by GPS in 60–90 minutes, and will pull a 24-row John Deere corn planter. He probably wouldn’t even use it to work down a 40-acre field because that field would be too tiny to effectively turn around very well.My great-grandfather would have been stunned at that. He might have imagined it, but it would have been a wild dream.One guy can work ten times the cropland that my great-great-grandfather could have with a quarter of the work.And yields have gone up, too. Hybrid corn and advances in other crops have made it so that today’s farmers are growing an order of magnitude more per acre than my great-grandfather did.But all of those advances come at a cost. A bag of seed corn or soybeans can cost upwards of $100 a bag, and is currently going for as much as $180 a bag for the 2020 corn planting season. My grandfather once stormed out of a mill with me 25–30 years ago as a kid when the same sized bag of seed corn was going to be $15 because it was “highway robbery” and he figured he could get it cheaper elsewhere.The same is true of dairies. My great-grandmother milked 20 cows by hand; a large operation at the time. In the 50’s, they got an electric vacuum pump system after the farm got electricity, and built a bigger, modern milking barn. That bumped them up to 60 head. In the 70’s, they were able to add on and up that to 100 head. By the early 2000’s, they were a small dairy, starting to be unable to compete. My uncle made some bad decisions, but he leveraged the land like crazy and cheated my great-grandmother out of her share of the farm to afford a 240 head new barn with a milking parlor.He’s still a small operation now and is close to bankruptcy.There’s a farm about two dozen miles over that has 8,400 head and the farmers don’t even milk the cows now; the cows have an RFID tag and when the cow feels like it wants to get milked, it wanders over to a stall and a robotic milking machine reads the tag and hooks itself up. The system tracks the cow’s individual production.When my great-grandmother was doing the milking, there were probably fewer than 8,400 milking cows in the county.But that huge operation is probably over a $10 million investment. That would have been unfathomable for my great-grandfather.Whether crop or dairy, it’s been evolve or die, and evolving requires growing into a massive factory farm. That equipment and the buildings are expensive. And the margins are thin. If you couldn’t get enough credit to expand, you went bankrupt. If you had a bad year or two, you went bankrupt. The margins on all of that are razor thin; the farmer is probably actually netting pretty little, if not taking a routine annual loss many years.Small farm bankruptcies are skyrocketing right now because factory farms are keeping the prices so low as to make the margins non-existent or below break-even for the little guys.The area where I grew up is a moonscape of rotted out, fallen down barns, abandoned outbuildings, and lonely old farmhouses with lonely old retired farmers who have given up. They sold off all the equipment, and if they can rent out the land for enough to pay off the mortgage, they do, or sell it off for enough to satisfy the liens and keep four or five acres with the house. And when the old man and his wife pass away, the kids, who have moved to the city, don’t want to take care of it anymore. I’ve seen a dozen or two of those old houses just demolished; the outbuildings used for storage if anything at all.Maybe 10–20% of the farms that were operating when I was a kid thirty years ago are still milking. Six of the seven neighbors my grandparents and uncle had that were farming when I was a kid are out and quit wholesale. The one left isn’t doing dairy anymore, the kid, who’s almost exactly my age, sold off the dairy cows and most of the equipment, does some basic crop farming, and grass-fed beef. One of the last neighbors to sell had gotten up to about 1400 acres that he’d owned and another 400 he rented before he sold out to a guy from Iowa who trucks up even more massive equipment than I described above, works up the whole thing in less than a week, and moves on to the next bit.One guy. With probably a dozen hands. I have no doubt that he owns or rents over 36,000 acres.Who needs a whole town to support that anymore? He isn’t going into my hometown for groceries every week, or the downtown coffee shop on a routine basis. He isn’t in the bars regularly. He isn’t buying stuff from the local hardware store, or tires and oil changes from the local mechanic.Even if he were local, he certainly isn’t buying the same amount as the 100+ farm families he’s replaced.Infrastructure also drastically changed my home area. Infrastructure, especially transportation infrastructure, dramatically reduces the friction costs of commerce. If it costs less to move stuff to market, people will build stuff there. If not, people won’t.The railroad was first on this. Wherever the railroad went, towns grew along it. Where the railroad didn’t go through, those places died or never grew. There’s a little town of about 300 people, about big enough to have an “unincorporated” sign and not much more.There’s a huge Catholic cathedral there, built to serve probably a 150 family congregation. Today, it serves probably a few dozen for a whole area.That’s because the railroad was supposed to go through the town, which is why they built it. There’s half a dozen other old businesses that used to exist, too, the hollowed out remains of their buildings still visible, built in anticipation of a train that literally never came.Because the railroad company built ten miles east, instead.That town died. Or rather, never grew at all. The businesses mostly folded, with the exception of a bar and a butcher that finally relocated when I was a kid. There was a fancier restaurant there that closed up about five years back finally. It had a for-sale sign on it since before I graduated high school, but the guy who owned it could never find a buyer and finally just retired.Today, railroads are largely replaced by highways and interstates, though freight rail is making a comeback in some places. Not enough to support a whole town, like it once did, but enough to keep some businesses going.The main corridor in my home area is now I-41, 20–30 miles from town. It’s only recently been made into an interstate. When my parents were first dating, it was only two lanes. I still remember when there were no overpasses and it was cross-traffic most of the way by us.As the interstate and a few four-lane state highways have grown, the towns along them have stayed steady or grown with them in some spots.The towns between the main highways? They’re mostly gone or drying up. One got virtually wiped out by a tornado twenty-some years ago and never really recovered. Every year, they keep talking about consolidating the school district with a nearby one because enrollment is too low to sustain it independently. The elementary school closed fifteen years back and K-8 are all in one building now.I remember a couple years ago, I was going through Iowa on my way to a wedding and they’d recently moved I-80. The main highway that it now paralleled used to go through a bunch of little towns. We got off the super-slab and went through some of them because we weren’t in a hurry to get to Colorado. Half of everything was boarded up. I asked the cashier about it. People don’t want to exit the highway and drive four miles south to get to Casey’s General Store. They just bypass the towns and wait until the next bigger stop. Where towns could, they’d tried to move towards the highway, but that’s often not possible.It’s what happened to the towns on Route 66. A few remaining nostalgic pieces of it remain, but most of it’s just gone. Whole towns were just erased.But even my hometown isn’t seeing new facilities getting built for manufacturing and the like, because of a lack of infrastructure. There’s a decent state highway into town that they keep in reasonable repair, but it’s a ways to the interstate still. The existing facilities keep churning out stuff, but if the companies are expanding, it’s along the four-lane highways and the towns and cities on those, still reasonably nearby enough, I suppose.One company bought out that old plant that went bust I mentioned and turned it into a big R&D facility, since it doesn’t need much import/export and it’s smack in the middle of town. Getting trucks there is a pain in the ass. When they come up with something, they send the specs over to the shiny new plant two towns west, which is built on a four-lane highway with direct access to Madison and Milwaukee.Internet is another infrastructural element that is significantly lagging in some of these places. Nobody’s running fiber to my hometown for the most part. A lot of people still have DSL. Maybe satellite. Apparently Verizon or Frontier is upgrading some of downtown somewhat. The last time I was at the local coffee shop to use the wi-fi, the speed test ran up to 15 megabits.The cell coverage depends on the provider, but it’s spotty even in downtown. Verizon is okay. US Cellular is the preferred choice. Sprint, T-Mobile, and AT&T are complete dead zones. That makes it hard to operate a retail business these days, which is increasingly dependent on the internet for sales and backend that we take for granted. You’re not selling much if you can’t use so much as a Square reader at the local businesses. And you’re not getting a lot of tourists if their phones are off the grid before they get to the city limits.And younger people don’t want to live in a town where they can’t get Netflix or Prime Video at even standard resolution half the time. So, they’re not moving there, or leaving for greener pastures if they can.Because there isn’t enough demand, the cable companies don’t bother upgrading the lines unless they have to. Because there isn’t basic high-speed broadband, nobody moves there to create the demand. It’s a vicious cycle. My folks just moved out of the place where I grew up and moved to the edge of a moderately large rural town. They get one internet provider, which maxes out at 8Mb down, 4 up. If they were two blocks over, they could get another provider with much better bandwidth, but where they are, they’re just screwed. A lot of places are like that. There’s no competition, and relatively light demand, so there’s basically no reason for the telecoms to bother running anything out there.At least my hometown and surrounding area are still close enough to major transportation routes that Fed-Ex and UPS will come all the way out. My in-laws have to drive 20 miles into town to pick up anything. They’ve been where they are for fifteen years and two weeks ago, a Fed-Ex truck actually went all the way to their house for the first time, ever. The delivery driver said he would never do it again. They don’t even get mail delivery to their place; they have to go up the minimum maintenance road five miles to a turnaround if it gets delivered, and they maintain a PO box in the slightly larger, but further away town for that purpose instead.Water is increasingly an issue, too. New water treatment plants with higher capacities are expensive and getting more so. Rural areas have a lower population density to spread that cost around, and that means either a need for increased state aid, or higher property taxes.If you don’t live right in town, that water isn’t probably coming to you. So, the farmers and people who live outside of town, but who are in the township and so would pay the increased taxes to pay for it, vote against it. They’re already paying literally tens of thousands of dollars for septic systems and wells; paying more property taxes for someone else’s water on top of that, while getting nothing in return, is a hard sell.Even trash collection is an issue here. Depending on the size of the town, you might have to do it yourself or contract with a company, because the town itself might not provide it. Again, friction cost for a business, and another thing that sometimes makes people not want to move there. I grew up with it, so the idea of a garbage guy that actually comes to your house is still weird to me, as are the ideas of a) not having an organic bucket that needs to get hauled out to the brush pile by the line fence, b) not having a burn barrel for paper garbage, c) not needing to separate out metals from other recycling to take to the salvage yard when there’s enough to get the higher price, or d) that the garbage guy comes at a specific time rather than taking it to the dump on Saturday morning or dropping the cash in the can or slot to pay for the bags you put in if you come not on a Saturday morning.When rural areas lack easy access to the kinds of infrastructure that reduces commercial friction costs, they’re at a serious disadvantage. It’s more expensive to do things, it’s more difficult to attract workers, and as a result, what sustains these small towns begins to go elsewhere.The decline itself then turns into a vicious cycle. As the major sustaining industries and businesses give out, or the resources like a clay or gravel pit start to dwindle, the people that can leave, do, especially younger people.That increases the concentration of people remaining in poverty.And with an increased concentration of poverty comes a lot of the problems that arise out of that: increased crime, increased drug use as depressed people try to self-medicate, depressed property values that make it even harder to get out, and more.The schools end up with lower enrollment, and lower tax revenues, and lower state aid. So they have to start cutting services. And then people move out of the district because they want their kids in a better school, if they can.Any young people who can get out flee. That leads to a brain drain of the community. It’s hard to get young professionals to move back if they think they’re never going to make enough money to justify it, or lose a quality of life that they enjoy elsewhere.So, that means fewer social workers, attorneys, doctors, etc. serving these areas that can help mitigate these problems of poverty, and it spirals downward even more. People of means have fewer kids; people without them have more but can’t support them. Services get progressively thinner, making people more desperate.More and more desperate people often end up getting into the criminal justice system one way or another, and once you’ve got a felony, everything is substantially harder. Housing, employment, everything. That traps more and more people, as well.People that are trapped get more and more hopeless. Suicide rates skyrocket.Eventually, the whole thing just gives out. The remaining people die off. The houses and businesses are abandoned and left to crumble.We’re not just talking about your boom and bust ghost towns of the Wild West. There’s plenty of these that are modern, some dying in the last few decades. There’s a few places I know of around where I grew up where the last living inhabitants were present just a few years ago. Today, there’s a handful of vacant buildings and nothing else left. You can walk right in a few of them. Some of them are so far gone that you wouldn’t even know that several thousand people once lived there in some cases as recently as thirty or forty years ago just by looking at them.One town near where I grew up used to actually put up their own population sign and an old man would repaint the number by hand every time someone died or moved away, until he died and nobody took over the task. There was a lumberyard/building center there, a church, and a bar, when I was a kid at least. It was a quarry town for limestone before that, but the easily accessible limestone ran out in the 60’s. There were probably 100 residents total, maybe, when I was a kid, but at one point there were about 1900 people who lived there. The businesses closed and the church is boarded up now. About twenty houses remain; two others were destroyed by fire - one started accidentally by a homeless person who was squatting in it after it was abandoned. The businesses are all vacant, the for-sale signs faded and dusty.Sometimes a natural disaster comes in and finishes the job. Gays Mills in Wisconsin has been flooded completely out several times in the last decade. Hundreds of residents just gave up and never came back when the insurance gave them an out. Some businesses are trying to stick it out, or relocate as disaster relief has tried to make it possible to move the town to higher ground.Lastly, the death rate is exceeding the birth rate. Sixty to eighty years ago, you needed ten kids to run the farm, and the infant mortality rate was considerably higher.In the last 20–30 years, though? People aren’t having babies. The birth rate in a lot of these rural areas is well below replacement. The oldest generations are dying off with increasing rapidity every year.Death rates among 18–64 year olds in rural areas are also on the incline. The opioid crisis really has disproportionately affected rural areas not because it’s higher per capita, but because there’s just fewer people overall and so the same per capita impact has a greater overall impact.But suicides are where it’s gotten really out of control. The rural suicide rate is bonkers higher than urban areas. It’s as much as 25% higher in some areas, and it’s risen over 40% in the last 20 years. There’s been a lot of research into this, with hypotheses ranging from lack of health care (both in insurance and in care providers) to stigma around mental health to simply increased access to guns, but there has not been a good consensus around what factors are most prevalent or most contributory.This is perhaps the most literal reason rural towns in America are dying: they are literally seeing more death than birth.Some other rural towns are growing around new industries. In Kansas, feedlot and meatpacking plants are growing substantially. Feedlots are smelly as hell. You don’t want to live anywhere near them. Seriously. Even setting aside the animal cruelty issues that are often present, they’re just awful places to be within ten miles of. But, they also provide jobs. For the desperate rural worker, any port in a storm.In Minnesota, it’s chicken and turkey processing. There’s a handful of towns that have poultry processing, and they’re doing pretty well for now.But those jobs are not very secure. They’re hard labor, and if someone gets laid up, there’s enough people willing to take the jobs that someone can just be replaced. Anti-union sentiment from conservatives that dominate these areas don’t make anything easier, either.Additionally, these industries also creating a lot of tension because the local natives don’t want those jobs due to the lack of security and don’t often apply, or can’t pass a drug test to qualify; instead, these jobs are attracting a lot of immigrant labor, such as Somali refugees. These are more typically than not legal immigrants, but that makes little difference to some people who are already mistrustful of any outsiders. I have a relative who moved into a rural town thirty years ago and still is considered a transplant and given second-class citizenship to a generational local.But many of these industries are also boom-and-bust. The oil fields in the Bakken and the Permian Basin led to huge expansions of parts of North Dakota and Texas, but as quickly as they exploded, they’ve died off as oil prices crashed in recent years.Those feedlots and chicken processing plants are likely as insecure. All it takes is a commodity oversupply, or a trade war, to shutter whole plants. And if that’s the primary employer for the area, it can take a significant piece of the town when it goes.Some rural towns are still doing okay, or even growing a little, and in sustainable ways.What’s kept my hometown alive is that it’s a good bedroom community that’s 30–45 minutes driving from two reasonably large urban areas and less than two hours from two more metro areas. Those are people who want to live in a small, safe, quiet neighborhood, but they don’t work there. They commute to the larger cities in the region.Enrollment is back up a little in the school district with people moving in to live in a quiet spot, and class sizes are back up to about 95-ish. The school has some good programs such as an award-winning music program that have brought in school choice students from neighboring districts (with corresponding state aid), or even gotten some individuals to move there.The tax base has remained about neutral or grown a little as developments and new housing grow slowly. Areas that were farm fields when I was a boy are now subdivisions generating more property taxes than the agricultural zones they once were.There are some rural areas that have this geographical quirk and are mostly becoming the new form of suburbs for those wealthy enough to either buy a nice place in a small town, or a couple acres of former farmland and build a house out in the country. The cost of living is usually reasonable or even sometimes lower than the city or suburbs; housing is certainly cheaper even if certain commodities are a bit higher.But there’s a lot of rural areas that don’t have that quirk of geography.Get out in the middle of Nebraska, or Iowa, or Kansas, or Minnesota and there’s a lot less. It’s a long, long way to the urban centers.Those places are increasingly seeing the demise of rural America the hardest.

Some states — Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming — even permit a tax credit for homestead property.