A part of the country with declining population may benefit from the corona in the long run If I am a rural economic development person I am touting the rural life with ads in every metro area. The work from home concept is likely to be a more permanent approach as some companies discover that it is cheaper and can be just as effective. Centralized servers allow you to monitor work station where ever you are at. Clearly rural counties and cities have the least corona issue...s--as they were in the SARS--- and the next 'plague' will likely be the same. Families are safer in so many ways in rural areas in general from crime to gangs there are just less or nearly none. When I served as budget director in Kansas I asked staff to reach out to rural counties to check on availability of office space and got a incredible amount of response including offering free space for state jobs. To me the advantages were obvious: 1) the state saved money; 2) it allocated taxpayer funding in a better way instead of sending so much of it to Topeka where it was used to build up the city 3) it put state jobs and state salaries where it would make a huge difference both for the town and the workers. A state salary and benefits in most rural towns would allow for a far better standard of living 4) those towns would benefit greatly from the new property tax and sales tax revenues even if the work space was free 5) it diffused the congregation of workers in a way that would eventually turn Topeka into something other than a "government town". The pork that built up in Topeka was nothing short of astounding as I found for example Sebelius' friends had special leases with government agencies that were many times what a top flight space in a rural town would cost. Nearly 80 counties offered up space for free or at really low costs. As someone who had set up a multi state CPA firm the logistics were not difficult. The politics were impossible. State workers unlike the private sector believe they control the agencies and had the right to stay where they were at no matter how much more it cost the taxpayer. The Democrats---which is about all that represent Topeka---were willing to torpedo any cost savings to keep it a government town and by extension Democrat. Private companies don't have those issues. They will miss a huge opportunity if they don't look at the rural areas after this corona shutdown.
at Steve Anderson - Real Fiscal Conservatism - March 31, 2020 at 07:18AM
A part of the country with declining population may benefit from the corona in the long run If I am a rural economic dev...,
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