To The Moon

Our poorest towns don’t even function the same way as the rest of the nation.

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Imagine, in your head, a town on the edge of collapse. High poverty levels, high crime levels, declining population, and declining job opportunities.

Hopefully, you’ve never had to live in one. If you have, though, you’ll have a clear image of what “downtown” or the “commercial” area looks like. For those who don’t, it’s this:

• Dollar store

• Check-cashing agency (likely also says “WE BUY GOLD”)

• Liquor store

• Bail bonds

• Some weird no-name convenience store that has 4-day-old buffalo wings in a warmer

• Another liquor store

• Used car lot with about 12 cars for sale, all older than 2009

• Maybe a questionable defense attorney (not guaranteed)

You won’t see a Walmart. You won’t see a Publix or Shoprite or whatever your regional food store of choice is. Whole Foods might as well be Jupiter. No Chevrolet dealerships. Even brands like 7–11, Wawa, Speedway, and RaceTrac are probably at least 10 miles away.

This is a problem for a whole host of reasons. Our economic system is designed to follow the money. Since such a large percentage of it rests in the hands of such a comparatively small group of people, corporations and advertisers are better off paying attention to just the top 5–10% of the nation than they are to the other 90% combined, in many cases.

I mean, if I’m a retailer, I can sell 500 cups of noodles at a $0.03 profit margin each, or I can just sell one guy caviar for $120 an ounce at a 100% markup because he likes to show off. I’ll actually make 33% more off of the latter individual than I would the first 500 combined.

The end result of that type of system is the despair-filled, opportunity void that many of our country’s citizens call home. These can be old, “Rust Belt” towns long since abandoned by the corporations that fueled the economic engine of the area, or neighborhoods of urban decay in otherwise healthy cities. But they do share a few traits, regardless of location.

The opportunities are few. Someone born there is at a tremendous disadvantage the second they get out of the womb. Crime is high. And the rest of the world ignores them.

Silos

It’s easy to believe that the outside world doesn’t exist if your day-to-day life reveals no evidence of its existence. If you live in one of these areas, there’s a pretty good chance that the same family has been in the same house for generations — and that house is likely in complete and total disrepair by now. Nobody moves into your town or neighborhood, only out. There are no Walmarts, Publix, ShopRite, or whatever.

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Instead, you’re probably served by the less-than-stellar list of stores I mentioned at the top of the article. And those “retailers” are generally not good places to be. Dollar General, for example, is a great place to work if you like getting into gun fights or if you’re a big fan of armed robbery in general. I went into detail on that lovely company’s issues separately on my Substack, so I won’t rehash it here.

What’s important, instead, is that they all prey on or at least partially depend on poverty, and many of them are partly at fault for perpetuating it. In these sad and forgotten silos of society, almost everything nearby only serves to make it worse.

Now I’m not one to completely absolve people of individual responsibility and decision-making. Some people are born into these situations and, with sufficient willpower, intelligence, and more than a little luck, escape. But there is a tremendous disadvantage to that individual as well. Or, put another way.

An individual born in Orange County, California who puts in minimal effort in their studies and work is likely to get through about two-three years of college, work some mid-level sales job, and eventually inherit a bunch of wealth. An individual in Camden, NJ who applies the same amount of effort is likely to make it to 10th grade and be dead by 25.

Providing opportunities out of these neighborhoods is essential if we want to strengthen our overall economic health. Leaving large swaths of people out of the economy due to no reason other than the circumstances of their birth means a lot of missed opportunities for innovation as we let the potential of our population pass by. This is particularly true in the United States, where an aging and possibly outright declining population will need all of its working-age population to be at their very best.

Right now, these silos provide the opposite of a ladder out of the bottom rungs of society — they create a cycle of poverty, instead. Payday loans, pawn shops, buy-here-pay-here, all items that put people in hock to companies that are more akin to a 1970s loan shark than they are actual creditors.

With APRs near the 400% mark and, in many cases, rates even higher than that, payday loans are perhaps the most predatory of them all. Still, plenty of poverty-cycle items abound in communities like this. Our criminal justice system itself is one — not enough money for vehicle registration renewal? Here’s a ticket that costs twice as much for having an unregistered vehicle on the street.

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Can’t pay that either? Here’s a bench warrant for failure to pay traffic tickets. Now you’re in the hole for thousands. Can’t clear those? Off to jail. Come back out? Good luck getting a job with that record, now. Also, your driver's license has long been invalidated from those tickets, so reliable transportation is going to be a problem, too.

The disadvantages in these communities are significant enough without us having to add to them, too.

Opportunity

We know we have tons of work to do in these communities from a government perspective, and plenty of programs already advocate for them. In fact, one could make an argument that the working class — rather than the poor — are the most forgotten group of individuals in this country.

But that’s from a government perspective. In terms of our economic system, it is most certainly the poorest among us who are willfully ignored by many of the corporations and services that the rest of us use regularly to add convenience or luxury to our lives. We don’t have our food options limited to Wendy’s or the above-mentioned Dollar General — there are probably a few supermarkets in your community, if not a Whole Foods.

While this seems to be a rather asinine street to drive down, the companies that serve these communities have a real impact. Say, for whatever reason, an individual decides not to go to college. This decision is far more common in poor communities than it is in wealthy ones already — 400% more common, actually — but the options get worse from there.

It is not impossible for someone to be intelligent and simultaneously decide against college — I would know. It is also very possible for someone to slowly work their way up from a menial job into a six-figure one. Front desk agents become supervisors, managers, GMs, area managers. The aisle stocker at Walmart could, conceivably, one day become a GM and make upwards of $100,000. I ran from bank teller up to senior positions on the corporate side in commercial lending. It isn’t impossible.

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When it becomes impossible is when the employment opportunities in town are “liquor store,” “green mart,” “dollar store,” and “check cashing agency.” These are all locations that are more likely to offer a job than a career, and that job itself is likely menial and dangerous simultaneously.

Then we turn around and inquire to ourselves about why these communities are so crime-ridden. The answer’s right there. If an adolescent can’t see any reasonable path to comfort, let alone wealth, by playing the game straight, then they’re going to play the game crooked. If the straight-laced people in town are rewarded with a $ 14-an-hour “assistant manager” job and five armed robberies a year, why even try?

I’m not saying it's the right outlook, but it’s certainly an enticing one. Particularly if you’re in adolescence and have had a very limited set of experiences to provide you with any insight. It can very much seem like the world doesn’t care about you, there’s no reasonable path out of your current situation that’s legal, and there’s no way to easily escape.

As a society that purports to care about all of its people, this is an area that will need some serious attention. One would think, for all we spend on overinflated defense contracts or mismanaged government projects, we’d have enough resources to provide some incentive for investing in these communities.

We need to begin focusing on opportunity creation and broaden our definition of what that means. A narrow focus like that we currently employ — formal education and formal education only — will not be up to the task. Instead, we need an approach that looks at advancing all varieties of learning and development, whether it be on-the-job, vocational, or formal academia.

Simultaneously, we need to disincentivize items and corporations that create a cycle of poverty or lure citizens further down the drain. At a bare minimum, we need to better educate people on how tragically misguided things like payday loans can be. We should seriously look at a set of criminal justice system reforms that focus our resources on crimes that actually impact people, rather than minor (but easy to catch) offenses that more often occur due to lack of funds than they do willful negligence.

In short, we need to bring our bottom quintile of income earners and citizens into the rest of the economy. Sweeping things under the rug never works in the long run.

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