rural America

President Obama dissuaded his longest-serving cabinet member, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, from quitting in late 2015 by putting Vilsack in charge of the administration's efforts to stem heroin and prescription opioid abuse in rural America, says the Washington Post. Vilsack felt rural issues were ignored in Washington and, after seven years on the job, there was little left for him to accomplish at USDA.

Rural America is in better economic shape than the Census Bureau said in its annual report on income and poverty, says the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The think tank says rural and urban America enjoyed a decline in poverty and a rise in household incomes during 2015, according to a Census report issued two days after the bureau painted a picture of diverging conditions.

The huge difference in the way urbanites and rural residents view government and society is the "San Andreas fault" of American politics, says the Daily Yonder in summarizing a study by two University of Virginia researchers. Rural Americans are twice as likely to feel left behind as urban residents, with the highest levels of disaffection found among males, Baby Boomers and those in the least populated parts of the country.

Too small to support a big box supermarket, some rural towns are turning to alternative grocery store models to feed their populations, says High Country News. In Walsh, Colo., (pop. 600), townspeople invested in $50 shares to jumpstart a grocery store.

During a panel discussion at the summer meeting of the National Governors Association, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack urged state governments to alter the "extraction economy" of sending goods and people to the city, said the Des Moines Register. One step to bolster rural areas, Vilsack said, would be for governors to work with schools and large institutions to buy food locally.

The latest Census Bureau estimates of people living in each county raise the possibility that four years of modest population loss in rural America may be ending, says the USDA. "The 2014-15 improvement in non-metro population change coincides with rural economic recovery and suggests that this first-ever period of overall population decline, from 2010 to 2015, may be ending," says Amber Waves, a USDA publication.

The child-poverty rate in rural America was 26.7 percent in 2012, the highest rate in more than four decades, according to Census Bureau data. An analysis by the USDA's Economic Research Service says income inequality was the primary reason for the increase, far outweighing the effect of the overall decline in rural family income due to the recession of 2007-09.

In the long recovery from the recession of 2008-09, one big thing is missing in rural and small-town America: new businesses. "Rural areas have seen their business formation fall off a cliff," says the Washington Post, citing a net loss of businesses in nearly two of every three rural counties from 2010-14, a much worse situation than what happened in the wake of previous recessions.

The Washington Post says its county-by-county analysis of death records compiled by the federal government "shows a clear divide in the health of urban and rural Americans, with the gap widening most dramatically among whites.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the Republican winner of Iowa's presidential caucuses, drew a larger share of the vote from rural counties than billionaire Donald Trump or Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, reports the Daily Yonder.

While only one-fifth of the U.S. population, rural Americans account for half of people who don't use the Internet, say the Daily Yonder, citing a McKinsey and Co report.

The White House announced creation of a $10 billion Rural Infrastructure Opportunity Fund to draw private investment into projects in rural America. The government will identify projects in need of financing and could provide a part of the funds itself or could let private investors handle it entirely. "This is a new way for us to do business," said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

"At the geographic level, poverty in the United States is overwhelmingly a rural phenomenon," says an introductory article in Choices, the journal of agricultural economics. "Compared to rural America, urban America has been experiencing lower poverty rates. This gap has existed since the 1960s, when the poverty rates were first officially calculated, and it has been widening in the last few years."

Private and public lenders are scheduled to testify on availability in rural America at a House Agriculture subcommittee hearing.

Some 217 rural counties are among the nation’s top “creative-class” counties, says the Daily Yonder. They rank in the top 25 percent of counties in percentage of workers in fields such as the arts, architecture and engineering.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced $4.37 billion in grants and loans to 10 rural electric cooperatives on Thursday for clean energy projects that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 1.1 million tons a year. With the awards, the USDA has allocated nearly $9 billion of the $9.7 billion available in the Empowering Rural America program.