It's Still Jobs, Stupid

Having a good paying job can cure a lot of problems.

Whether you're a former coal miner in West Virginia or a 20-something Iraqi boy who can't support his family, finding a job that not only pays the bills but is a career can be the difference between surviving and having a life. A lot of factors were behind the election of Donald Trump, but a primary cause was the desire of many rural Americans to go back to a time when their community was thriving. Back to a time when good jobs were easy to find locally and they paid well enough to keep the family in a middle class lifestyle.

Despite the rhetoric, a lot of those lost manufacturing jobs aren't coming back. But that doesn't mean that all is lost for those rural Americans. As this Wired piece points out, there are jobs available that could easily be filled by these struggling Red State voters and it really just takes a bit of training and some initiative:

These sorts of coders won’t have the deep knowledge to craft wild new algorithms for flash trading or neural networks. Why would they need to? That level of expertise is rarely necessary at a job. But any blue-collar coder will be plenty qualified to sling Java­Script for their local bank. That’s a solidly middle-class job, and middle-class jobs are growing: The national average salary for IT jobs is about $81,000 (more than double the national average for all jobs), and the field is set to expand by 12 percent from 2014 to 2024, faster than most other occupations.

Rebooting the economy of rural America isn't an impossible task. But it will take moving beyond the cheap political talking points and the nostalgia for jobs that are no longer there. It requires deciding that community colleges and vocational training can be the gateway to good paying jobs, if there are pathways available for both students and mature workers looking for a new field of employment.