SNAP should just be money instead of EBT cards. The restrictions on what may be purchased likely increase rather than decrease fraudulent use that isn't related to genuine need. Nowadays housing and vehicle costs are often bigger strains on household budgets than food, and all these fraud schemes depend on people who have enough to eat but are stretched on the rest of their budget. Also, it contributes to people staying in poverty to make it mandatory to spend benefits on disposable goods rather than saving up a little to pay for emergencies, a move to a region with more jobs, etc.
Other first-world countries have cash instead of food stamps, and it's not like their poor people are going hungry because it's going to drugs, or whatever the moralistic worry would be.
But right-wingers will tell you that welfare payments discourage people from the compulsion to toil at terms offered -- very raw terms, of course.
Appalachia has always been a source of unskilled workers for Industrial America. For years the typical career advice has been "Take 19 north to Pittsburgh/21 north to Akron or Cleveland/23, 25, or 27 to Michigan/52 to Indianapolis or to the Chicago area/219 to Buffalo"... that may be over. Such implies a talent drain, and if the Rust Belt begins to prosper again (which is more likely than that Appalachia will ever become prosperous) the talent drain will begin anew.
The counties mentioned in this thread:
Owsley--80.95% Romney
Clay--83.65% Romney
Jackson--86.25% Romney
Leslie--89.62% Romney
Maybe people can't throw the bums out.
That's much of the problem. Most sizable communities have some contest in politics. Even in Detroit or Philadelphia one can find factions within the Democratic Party. A late uncle (who was a piece of work on politics -- very far to the Right, extremely bigoted against blacks and Jews -- could recognize from suburban Detroit a huge difference between Dennis Archer and Kwame Kilpatrick (who has had gigantic problems with the criminal justice system).
In Louisville one can find rich, politically-interested people who can go into politics as a hobby and so want to win that they will sell out their obvious class interests -- but in some rural areas there's just enough talent to fill such elected offices as exist. Those who win public office use it to enrich themselves and their cronies -- and they can do so while standing completely for out-of-state interests who bleed the state and the areas that they ostensibly represent. In rural Kentucky there just are no people who have the funds or the ability to organize people.
Single-Party government in the absence of competition within the Party serves people badly. It creates a few patronage jobs, but it rarely supports the creation of jobs that create some modicum of economic independence. It's bad for small business that might grow to have the potential for creating a political contest. Even the local car dealer knows enough to not challenge crooked pols who are among the few individual customers for new cars and who need to have the contract to sell vehicles for official use just to survive.
Some of those counties have been R-dominant for decades. I looked at the 1960, 1976, and 1992 Presidential elections for Kentucky -- and I saw some distinctly R-dominated counties in the southeast aside from those on the Virginia state line.
