Got a source for that? Honestly interested.
Wasn’t there someone in Washington who said something recently about “sh*thole countries”?
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That aspect was actually what somewhat surprised me: TFA says
The situation is particularly acute in Black Belt counties like Lowndes, where the annual median household income was just $30,225 and 25.4 percent of residents lived below the poverty line as of the 2010 U.S. Census.
$30k is certainly a deeply uncomfortable amount to live on in many areas(especially if ‘household’ includes sick kid/aging parent/chronic illness/etc. it’s); and I’d assume that the fine traditions of social hierarchy ensure that plenty of people are below the median; but by international standards it’s actually pretty high. PPP/inflation and other adjustments make direct comparisons trickier and probably more misleading than one would like; but the list here would put Lowndes county slightly above the UK and slightly below Japan; with generally-regarded-as-non-hellholes like the Netherlands and Denmark only a couple of hundred dollars a year more.
I assume, in a general sense, that a willingness(potentially an eagerness) to let the poors rot is involved; but I still don’t really understand how the numbers line up to get such poor results for what is, relatively speaking, a pretty decent amount of money.
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Health care costs.
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Which is doubly mystifying when you consider that the actual work of building America was done on the backs of slaves, endentured servants and slave-class immigrants. It’s almost as if the psychological wound of that reality is too great to countenance, so America has to spin a mythology about self-reliance and hard work.
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And retirement costs
And secondary education costs
And transportation costs
And…
I assume you mean tertiary eduction costs…
Actually, make that “I hope you mean tertiary education costs” 
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It’s complicated but the rich and government are to blame. They want money and support for themselves and they want to people to get nothing. If people focused on the rich and the government clients with the goal to replace them then people would have a fighting chance. The major of people are mesmerized by trivial entertainment and their own crushing problems.
Right you are.
I was born in Alabama in the mid-1950s and left in 1973. The poverty people are seeing now has been around all my life and has only gotten worse with the rise of conservatism conflated with fundicostalism. This is a state that does not maintain its infrastructure - forget expanding or upgrading it to accommodate needs. Its social services for people who are homeless or jobless are pitifully inadequate. Alabama does not invest in its public educational institutions and has allowed religious charter and private schools to flourish, despite their longstanding bigotry and discrimination against people of color, the poor, and LGBTQs. There is little reason for anyone to remain in this failed state and it is the perfect example of how the right wing would decimate American democracy if they replicate its repressive theocratic, sexist, homophobic, racist, and xenophobic insularity to go nationwide - which they are attempting. No, thanks!
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30K may be a livable median wage, especially in a low cost of living state like Alabama, but the salient term there is “median”. Half the people in the Black Belt counties earn less than that. A large portion of them earn significantly less than that.
That’s a problem.
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A remarkable thing happens when you drive across the border to Mississippi from Alabama - things get slightly, but perceptibly nicer. I’m not kidding.
@Bemopolis: Well, when you send a pittance to the Feds, three times much back is…still a pittance. I get that the “conservative” way is to make a shithole shittier, but I’m a flaming socialist and don’t want suffering people to suffer more.
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Now that’s interesting! Nicer in what ways, may I ask?
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Road pavement is in better condition, the houses are better kept, people have in-ground swimming pools instead of above ground, actual landscaping, fewer trailers serving as “houses” on a parcel of land instead of, well, houses. That sort of stuff. You can’t get the full experience from the Interstate, you have to explore the county roads to really see this stuff.
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So it sure seems possible that somehow “worst poverty in the developed world” doesn’t count indigenous people. It also seems possible that there are places in rural Alabama that are far, far worse off than I would have ever imagined. Neither is a very good scenario.
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Thx! (And I hope they can progress much further from there.)
Yes it is.
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Sure! I just took the list here and cross-referenced it with Wikipedia’s list of how states voted in the last presidential election.
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Worse than that in places. Attawapiskat First Nation (ᐋᐦᑕᐙᐱᐢᑲᑐᐎ ᐃᓂᓂᐧᐊ), (just do a Google search for images), they are still having suicide problems and the government seems to only talk.
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