George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 28 June 2017.]

Today Washington is buzzing with more fake news, scandals, investigations, and legislative brouhahas than people can remember.  This week, instead of delivering one of my usual exhaustively researched and well-thought-out four minute commentaries, I am going cover just a couple of the burrs that irritate under our communal blanket.

Small towns and counties educate their kids who then can’t wait to leave for schools and jobs elsewhere, never to return.  Now that has been happening for at least the last hundred years, or as the WW1 song says, ‘How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?’  Nevada County is a poster child for such out-migration of our young.  Hereabouts we have little drawing power left for our young people once they’ve gone to college elsewhere, save perhaps fond memories of their youth.  But those memories don’t put food on the table, and most certainly are not enough for choosing to raise a family here.

As covered in recent studies and news reports, this phenomenon is national in scope where the young leave rural counties and small towns for bigger cities.  Understandably, this process grows the economic inequalities that everyone is concerned about.  And here in our neck of the woods we sustain our twenty-year stagnation by doubling down on every anti-development regulation that reaches us from state and federal bureaucrats.  What’s worse, when the educated young don’t return, local businesses also suffer because they have no replacements for those who quit and retire.  The Wall Street Journal recently put some numbers together on rural youth chasing big city dreams, and they don’t look good for small communities. (more here)

In Nevada County, our progressives have created a politically correct quagmire to which people with dreams for something better will not risk coming off the beaten path and battle ‘city hall’ every step of the way to start a new enterprise, build a low-cost house, or even look for a job.  And these same voices continue to dun our mostly conservative retirees, the only remaining residents who import cash that is spent locally to keep alive the stores, shops, restaurants, and cultural offerings left in our community.  It is somehow their fault that businesses don’t locate here, followed by young families attracted by career building jobs.

On the national healthcare debate, we have a similarly massive blind spot which the national media purposely overlooks.  Obamacare has literally failed to deliver on all of its promised benefits and features, and even a growing cadre of Democrats now admits that it is crashing around us as we speak.  One of its humongous failures is Medicaid, the uncapped cancer that is destroying the fiscal underpinnings of every state government charged with its delivery.  Medicaid is an endemic fiscal disease that is well on its way to bankrupting the country.  The entitlement is totally unsustainable in every state that administers it.  You know something is unsustainable when year after year it eats up an ever-larger share of available resources required to maintain it, with no end to its appetite in sight. (more here)

The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity writes, “In nearly every state, Medicaid is either the largest or second-largest budget line, as well as the fastest-growing category. Every year state lawmakers, trying to carry Medicaid’s heavy burden, are forced to make difficult choices about what else to cut: education, roads, public safety.”  When discussing the repeal and replacement of Obamacare, the progressive media mention nary a word of the existential failure of the current healthcare program.  Instead they scream bloody murder about any plan that seeks to cap the cost of Medicaid as if the now rogue entitlement could go on forever, were it only left alone.  The opponents of any prudent measures to limit Medicaid remind me of passengers on the Titanic who refuse to get into a lifeboat because its seats may be uncomfortable.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.