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Category: Mobility

Midwest Hit With Tariffs & Shutdown Adds to Years of Recession – Needs A Heartland Venture Marshall Plan

(Editor Note: Insight Bytes focus on key economic issues and solutions for all of us. Please right click on images to see them larger in a separate tab. Click on the Index Topic Name at the beginning of each post to see more posts on that topic on PC or Laptop.)

Photo: heartlandhospice.com

Midwest farmers are declaring bankruptcy at a rate not seen since the Great Recession.  As prices for corn, soybeans, milk and corn decline to decade lows, the Minneapolis Federal Reserve reports that Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings in 5 states of the Ninth District.

Sources: United States Courts – Fed Ninth District, Federal Reserve Ninth District, FedGazette – 11/14/18

The Federal Reserve notes that based on the level of bankruptcies and the trajectory of the increase that bankruptcies will only increase. The government shutdown is exacerbating farmland pain.  The Trump administration announced last summer $12 billion in farmer subsidies.  But, because of the shutdown many farmers applying for subsidies and loans to plan for spring planting are not receiving the money they need. Many farmers and agriculture businesses are affected by the Department of Agriculture shutdown versus coastal states as shown below.

Source: Axios – 1/12/19

China turned to Russia and Brazil for soybeans in particular in the 4th Qtr of last year.  US sales to China dropped to almost zero. As a negotiating tactic, China last week did pledge to buy more soybeans as traders in Chicago noted last week an increase in sales orders. However, when China switched purchases to major suppliers last year it will be difficult for US farmers to unhook those deals already in place. As one farm owner noted, “ it just seems like it’s one thing after another, over and over.”

Heartland challenges have actually been going on for years even before the Great Recession with the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs since China joined the WTO in 2000.  The rural regions of the country have seen their wages grow at half the rate of metro areas.  The opioid epidemic has cost thousands of young workers future careers, unemployment is twice what it is in the East and West. The digital internet infrastructure in rural areas is quite often at analog rates 4 times slower than broad band.  Companies are at a disadvantage versus their metro competitors with slow bandwidth.  Rural region hospitals are closing at an increasing rate leaving many rural people with hundred mile or more drives to the nearest emergency room. Life expectancy in Mississippi is the same as Libya.  Heartland America has been left out the metro mainstream economy for the past 20 years. Our post – The Hallowing Out of Heartland America shows how rural regions have fallen behind in many infrastructure areas including: healthcare, Internet bandwidth, jobs, education with limited upward mobility for young people.

Next Steps:

The Heartland Venture Marshall Plan is similar in concept as the Marshall Plan deployed by the U.S. to rebuild the infrastructure of Europe after WWII, but instead of a government bureaucracy the Silicon Valley style innovation venture model is used.  Venture development is designed to start small, build on successful prototypes and use multiple sources of funding to gain as much support as fast as possible to make the venture a success.  Failure is part of the success fast, try several prototypes, do it, tweak it, try it again until it works or achieves the goals we set for the venture.

Here is a summary of the idea from our post of September 2017:

We propose building a startup non-government organization. We are recommending a different approach by the Federal government to act as an investor in a non-government organization called a Heartland Development Center.  An HDC acts as a central hub of critical services and infrastructure development while providing a continuous innovation system. The Heartland Development Center acts as a catalyst creating an innovation ecosystem to jumpstart local economics and social structures. HDCs would focus on all the key issues that a region needs to address to rebuild their economy and people’s lives: business formation, education and training, digital infrastructure, affordable housing, engaged local innovation media and health care.

The Federal government would seed the financing of these NGOs in key regions with additional funding from local and state governments, and major corporations who would benefit from the newly available job force tuned to their needs. HDCs would be ‘startup’ organizations installed at Land Grant universities bringing in leaders in their respective fields – ie. business formation – Y Incubator, preventive health – Cleveland Clinic, or training – Opportunity@Work as contractors to the HDC.  These NGOs would establish continuously renewing innovation processes to stay in touch with their citizen – customers and businesses. Administration services would all be contracted using cloud software services for HR, Payroll, Training, Benefits and other internal systems to keep costs down. The HDC startups would be piloted in 3 non metro areas, where they would tune their business and socio economic models for maximum impact, then use those working models to implement HDCs in 25 or more other key regions for 5 – 10 years.”

Economists see the opportunity to invest in rural regions to jump start a part of the economy in innovative ways. Joseph Stiglitz, nobel prize winning economist for example advocates turning blue collar rural areas into ‘green collar’ hubs focused on developing innovative environmental technologies, systems and services.

Congress sees the need as well, as Congressman Ro Khanna – D-17 California is working on legislation patterned after the land grant college Morrell Act of 1862 to make an investment in technology job development in rural sections of the U.S. Khanna has supported computer programming training in West Virginia and toured the Midwest with Silicon Valley executives and venture capitalists to encourage investments in the Heartland. He points out that there is no need to send jobs to China, Brazil or India when there are people in our Heartland who can do those jobs well and at lower cost than expensive coastal regions.

There is one indicator of the desperation that many rural people feel is the fact that the opioid epidemic has a 50 % greater incidence in the Heartland than in our metro or coastal cities. We need to be building bridges through programs like the Heartland Venture Marshall Plan between our coasts and the inland empire to bring together our people developing consensus and shared experiences. Each HDC would be staffed by a equal mix of apprentice and college graduates from local rural education systems and metro university graduates. They would comprise a ‘Heartland Service Corp’ modeled on the AmeriCorp program with a benefit of complete forgiveness of student debt for two to four years of service depending on the debt balance. We would be building shared experiences of our young people to bridge the gap between inland and coastal cultures. These young people can innovate new opportunities to create an economic future that works for all.

Building the Economic Power of Youth

(Editor Note: Insight Bytes focus on key economic issues and solutions for all of us, on Thursdays we spotlight in more depth Solutions to issues we have identified. Fridays we focus on how to build the Common Good. Please right click on images to see them larger in a separate tab. Click on the Index Topic Name at the beginning of each post to see more posts on that topic on PC or Laptop.)

Image: opportunityinsights.org

Last week a non-profit research and policy organization, Opportunity Insights published a startling map and database linking the success of children in poverty to their neighborhood to climb out of poverty.  A key finding is that children growing up in neighborhoods where there is low income continue to live in poverty as adults.  Though of more interest is that all factors being equal children where there where two parents in the household did significantly better than children in one parent households.  Family structure made a significant difference.

Source: Opportunity Insights – 10/4/18  (areas in blue, children who grew up in low income areas tended to make more money, children in dark red far less)

Certainly, households with just one bread winner, generally automatically means that there  is less income in that household.  Opportunity Insights notes that often single parent communities do not have the same ‘social capital’ as two parent communities.  In terms of parents that can support their children, tutoring after school, going to after school activities and a father who is there to provide support to the mother.  Particularly, for boys having a father in the household seemed to be determinative in future opportunities boys enjoyed in adult life.  Key to forming the right skills for a higher income is an example of a mother or father working a job, focusing on nurturing their children’s skills and being an advocate for the child in the school system.

John Hope Bryant, CEO of Operation Hope, a for purpose non-profit group helping low income people through financial coaching and skills development to build a secure economic future. Bryant notes that 63 % of middle income Americans cannot afford a $500 car repair or $1000 in emergency health care. Without financial independence, people cannot protect themselves from social injustice, economic manipulation and profiling, People need to learn how to build personal ‘capital’ to dig out of the community that keeps them in poverty. He observes growing up in Compton, a California low income community, that children in the neighborhood grew up with no positive aspirations.  They continue to be surrounded by negative roles models: drug dealers, loan sharks, and criminals who have the economic power.  Yet, they don’t have the ‘capital’ or knowledge on how build wealth in a positive way and key relationships.  A person with no hope is a dangerous person, who becomes angry, vengeful and desperate. Bryant says there are three types of issues for children in poverty neighborhoods:  low aspiration and few opportunities for 25 % of the problem, poor role models and a negative family and community environment for another 25 % and finally low confidence and self-esteem for 50 %.

Next Steps:

The Labor Force Participation Rate for  adults ages 24 – 54 is 82.5 % is at a new low, and has been declining since the Great Recession. The opioid crisis, a symptom of the hopelessness that many of our young people feel today is causing millions of otherwise productive people to not join the labor force.  Deutsche Bank completed an analysis of how the opioid epidemic is hurting labor participation in many states.

Sources: OECD, Deutsche Bank Research – 9/10/18

Researchers found that states in the South (overlays the poverty areas in the neighborhoods map above) Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and East Central – West Virginia there is a high correlation of opioid prescriptions and labor force rate.

It clear from a moral, ethical and economic standpoint we need as a country to invest in our young people who face increasing challenges in becoming upwardly mobile.  How do we do it?

John Hope Bryant is investing in people in these neighborhoods by providing families and individuals with tutoring to increase credit scores (maps of FICO scores of under 500 map into the above areas too) and how to get low cost loans.  Bryant sees developing entrepreneurial skills in starting new businesses as a way to move economically ahead as well.  More important is learning how high income people became wealthy through building relationships and developing the courage and skills to start a new business.  As he notes, moving from one failure to the next to learn and see trial and error as a necessary part of the path toward creating a product or service of value. The entrepreneurial process builds self-esteem and confidence so crucial in transforming lives and creating opportunities.

Opportunity@Work, a non-profit group originated in the Obama White House, then spun off is tackling the education issue head on with training focused on helping those outside of the economic mainstream to get jobs in the new economy. The group helps candidates get the skills they need in high tech, then making the connection between employers and workers with a non-traditional resume.  In addition, they are pioneering new ways to finance education so that students will not be saddled with thousands of dollars of education debt when they start their careers.  Opportunity@Work is targeting assistance for 1 million people to get hired in the next decade.

We have proposed that a Marshall Plan-like initiative with an entrepreneurial approach be led by the federal government, venture capitalists, corporations, health providers, non-profits and universities to gain a beachhead in many low income communities particularly in rural areas of the Midwest and South. The Heartland Initiative brings key leaders in many fields to focus with high impact on enabling a community and its people to join the economic mainstream from upgrading Internet speeds to providing local access to affordable health care and counseling for mental health issues.  It is a multi-faceted project because there are connected issues, it is one thing to provide a young person with training, but if they are still taking opioids they will fail a drug test by a hiring firm.  Details about the Heartland Initiative are in our post, calling for a new approach to social programs using an entrepreneurial model with seed financing and cooperative groups to spring into action.

We need to bring those that have been on the economic sidelines back into the mainstream of our economy if we are to make any progress as a nation on building an economy that works for all.  With mounting national debt in the trillions of dollars, student debt at $1.5 trillion and opioid deaths at epidemic levels we need to see building the economic power of our youth as one solution to our economic challenges.

Declining Mobility Limits Millennials Careers, Economy

 

Image: dailymail.co.uk

More millennials are living with their parents than ever before due to lack of income, availability of housing and marriage later in life.  Moves by people under age 35 are continuing to decline.  Seniors are moving a bit more but overall they are staying put in their homes for retirement, as the cost to move to a new home is soaring.  Home prices have increased on average by 6.7 % per year over the past five years, skewed toward large square foot homes for upper income buyers.

Source: Trulia – 1/31/2018

Overall Americans are not moving like they used to in the 1990s, and before the Great Recession. In 2017, 34.9 million Americans moved to new residences, translating to a household mobility rate of 10.9%, which is the lowest rate in the last 50 years since the Census Bureau has been tracking this statistic. Lack of mobility is showing up in total household formations including rental units, new and existing home figures.  For all of 2017 there were only 400,000 household units formed, notice this is a similar pace to the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Source: Federal Reserve of St. Louis, 1/2018

The mobility that is taking place is from major cities to major cities or coast to coast.  We noted in our post on Heartland Economics that one of the issues that faces many rural regions in the South and Midwest is lack of new jobs, digital infrastructure, health and education services.  When young people in these regions cannot receive the education they need to build a career where there are jobs in the cities they stay where they are in low wage jobs with few prospects of advancement. The opioid epidemic is worst in rural regions in the country where a sense of hopelessness has set in for many people.  While in the last quarter some of these regions have seen an increase in jobs, this increase in economic activity is likely to be a passing surge from a very low economic base to begin with that will not last without long term investment.

Next Steps:

Why should we be concerned with lack of workforce mobility?  Because, when people do not move to take on new jobs, or start families or get away from home, home purchases decline, furniture sales drop, appliance sales fall and the overall economic life blood of our economy stagnates. What do we need to do?  Raise wages for workers to a decent level in each metro and rural region of the country, so people can build a nest egg and make a down payment on a home.  Rental unit pricing needs to be addressed in a way that is fair to the multiunit owner while holding down rental costs. The most recent Tax Bill passed in December of 2017 eliminated the provision for tax deductions by employers or workers for unreimbursed moving expenses.  This provision needs to be reinstated to drive the costs of moving down.  Interest on first mortgages should be made tax deductible for all regions of the country with a special emphasis on low income first time buyers. In rural regions we recommend special tax zones be established to offer incentives for investors to setup businesses there, with partnerships with local universities to build incubators for startups much along the model pioneered in Silicon Valley yet tuned to the needs of the region.  The size of our workforce is declining, we have young people staying at home so we need to address the issue of lack of mobility head on to provide the  life opportunities to our young people that earlier generations enjoyed.

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