cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/7076150
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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The moment Clinton said that (and that's a direct quote), she lost any hope of getting most of Appalachia to vote for her.
To be clear about what Clinton's plan looked like, even if you ignored her terrible delivery of it, here's what it sounds like to the guys on the ground who'd benefit from it:
Step one, first you lose your job, and we're going to speed that up by tightening regulations with the express goal of killing the coal industry faster.
Step two, then you get put on unemployment and a retraining program. This of course will cause some of you to lose your hones and vehicles, and for some your family too because especially in very socially conservative areas a man losing a job for a prolonged period is often a catalyst to losing a marriage. Now that you've lost your home, downsized your car and lost your family it's time for...
Step three, the industry you've been retrained for doesn't exist, or doesn't exist at remotely the necessary scale here, so now you just need to pull up stakes and move elsewhere. Hope you didn't have any family nearby you cared to see, or took care of, or if you lost your wife in the previous step ever wanted to see your kids again.
Step four, congratulations! If you made it here, you probably have a job again. I mean, you had to sell your home just to stay afloat through the retraining, it pays less than your old job, you're living somewhere with a higher cost of living now, and you had to be cut off from your entire support network, but you're probably employed!
And all of that assumes her plan as proposed was actually going to be a thing that actually happened. As opposed to the at least as likely scenario where they still use regulations to kill the coal market more efficiently, but don't do any of the other stuff. Which was probably at least as likely in a post-Byrd world (Byrd was corrupt as all hell, but he always did his best for his constituents).
Why would unemployment cause people to lose their homes and vehicles? Wouldn’t a lot of retraining programs aim to find ways to sustain people’s living in the meantime?
Benefits aren't as big as the income you lose, and often get tied up in red tape on the way leading to delays. Depending on how weird your personal situation might be, it could be up to a couple of months. I don't recall her plan involving increasing and expediting benefits to people in her retraining program.
Unemployment doesn't provide as much money as the jobs people are losing. My state has a maximum of $362/week. That isn't going to let you make a mortgage payment, car payment, and buy food. There also generally a lag in receiving benefits, the first payment could take a month or so to show up.
Especially in red states that have intentionally made getting benefits a long and tedious process and don't hire enough people to process a sudden surge in unemployment (see Covid in places like Texas where it could be weeks or longer until you can even apply because the website is down from the surge of people)