NY Times op-ed out of rural Arkansas, "In the Land of Self-Defeat"

Monica Potts, a native of Clinton, Arkansas, population 2,602, has published an op-ed in today's Sunday New York Times about attitudes toward taxation and government services there.  It's a long read, but well worth it.  Potts "repatriated" to Clinton from Virginia not long ago, and her byline says she is writing a book about low-income women in Van Buren County, population 17,295.  Potts centers her story on a request from the county librarian for a raise, to $42,200.  The story doesn't indicate how much the librarian was earning when she made the request for a raise, but it does mention that her raise would have put her in the pay range of  teachers (some of the only folks in that region with college degrees) and county officials.  Never mind, though.  When the librarian's proposed raise was put on the Quorum Court agenda (county governing body), a Facebook conversation ensued--mostly negative--and the item got pulled.   Potts writes:

the fight over the library was rolled up into a bigger one about the library building, and an even bigger fight than that, about the county government, what it should pay for, and how and whether people should be taxed at all. The library fight was, itself, a fight over the future of rural America, what it meant to choose to live in a county like mine, what my neighbors were willing to do for one another, what they were willing to sacrifice to foster a sense of community here. 

The answer was, for the most part, not very much.

When I shared Potts' story with my mother, 75 years old and still working as non-certified personnel (teacher's aide) in a school system two counties over from Clinton/Van Buren County, Arkansas, my mom pointed out the lack of information about how big the librarian's raise would be in relation to her current salary, though I note a mention in Potts' story of $19/hour as the wage the librarian ultimately accepted, presumably what her predecessor earned.  My mom then wrote:

I would give her a raise but it would be consistent with the wage she was earning. [I note that $25/hour would represent an increase of more than 30% over what she accepted, $19/hour].  She has the choice to accept it or resign. When extra tasks are added to our job at school we don't get a raise. More to the point of the story, rural people see more waste of government funds because we know our neighbors and all shop at the same places. In [urban areas], that is not nearly the case. Additionally, rural people are closer to their ancestry where the values of our ancestors are still ingrained in us. We witnessed their hardiness and their independence upon themselves and we haven't forgotten what we learned. That kind of rural person will give his hard labor to help the individual he knows is trying.

As you might have gathered, my mother could be one of the low-income women about whom Potts is writing a book.  She is still working at age 75 in large part because it's hard to retire on Social Security and the modest pension she'll get from her years as non-certified personnel in an Arkansas school.  I've written more about her in my own missive on Rural and Working Class White Women in the Era of Trump.

Potts' story also reminds me of some earlier posts I've written on local government decisions out West, also to cut library services--and even law enforcement services.   This post collects links to various other posts, including from other parts of the country.

Indeed, Potts' feature op-ed also got me thinking about the efforts to raise tax revenues to build a county jail in my home county in the Arkansas Ozarks (Newton County is separated from Potts' Van Buren County only by Searcy County, also a persistent poverty county).  As I have written about in many posts here on Legal Ruralism, it took several years to convince Newton County voters to pass  sales tax increases that would both (1) raise enough funds to build the jail and (2) raise additional tax revenues to finance its operation.  (As in most of the South, local governments now tend to reach for sales taxes rather than property taxes; it's easier also to tax the tourists that pass through than just the landowners, regressive though the sales taxes are).  After all of that, once the tax increases passed and the jail was operational, the county still wound up contracting with the State of Arkansas to house state prisoners here.  It seems that doing so was necessary to "make ends meet."  And so my little ol' home county of 8,000 low-income people became a cog in the prison-industrial complex.

Sadly, it may be easier in economically depressed places like the Arkansas Ozarks to raise money to build a jail than it is to raise funds to build a library.

I can't help wonder who's really to blame for these poor, rural white voters' attitudes toward even local taxes (typically held as distinct from federal taxes going off to a distant government)?  Of what systems/forces are electorates like those in Van Buren County and Newton County products?  Is it accurate to use the language of "self-defeat," as the New York Times/Potts headline does?  or are outside forces at play?  national conservative politics?  the tea party?  elites who told these low-education, low-income rural voters behind the times, not competitive, worthless, "the problem"?  Is it really "self" defeat?  What forces have defeated these folks?  (See Annie Eisenberg's forthcoming article, not yet posted on ssrn.com, in the Boston College Law Review for some insights into this question).

Who created the hunker down mentality that makes the residents of Van Buren County, Arkansas so protective of the $20/each annually that the library would cost them?  Or did these folks and their attitudes just rise from the swamp?  Um, I mean river bed/valley floor ...