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My heart is broken by individual stories like this one, but I have a hard time sympathizing with these overwhelmingly conservative areas who lectured us "tax and spend liberals" about welfare queens and bootstraps when times were good for them. They were offered retraining and reeducation by the Clinton campaign and overwhelmingly rejected it. I'm happy to help these net-entitlement-consumers via my taxes, but their plight is hardly a priority given that they seem to have no interest in taking proactive steps to fix it.

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Funny - I have much the same feelings as you, but I believe in individual guilt rather than collective.

If an individual human doesn't seek work, does lots of oxy/other drugs [1], and refuses to do work that Mexicans are happy to do, I similarly don't consider their plight a priority. I hold this view regardless of who demographically similar people voted for.

I'm curious why are your sympathies based on collectivist voting habits rather than individual behaviors. To me that's just such a strange way to view things.

[1] I recently learned that approximately half of the male leisure class take pain medication daily, and they mostly just sit around watching TV and playing video games. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21...

Possibly these people don't want help and retraining from the Clinton campaign.

What they want is tariffs to rise and immigration to be restricted to the point their labor is worth something again.

Will this happen? And if it does will they be able to step in and fill the jobs? I'm not confident but I think that's what is desired. Not government programs.

> What they want is tariffs to rise and immigration to be restricted to the point their labor is worth something again.

No, what they want is time to rewind to where it was when they were doing well. They've been sold the lie that immigration restrictions and tariffs will achieve (or at least approximate) that.

> Will this happen?

No. In fact, rising tariffs will (indirectly) make their labor worth less.

"the lie"

debatable.

You are free to present your argument.

That is my argument.

I am skeptical that retraining solves much:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/01/27/512060753/episo...

It's ironic that you bring up mythology about welfare queens, while supplying something what I suspect is an equivalent myth of people being unwilling to take proactive steps to help themselves..

I hear 'retraining' brought up a lot, what does this entail? What do people get retrained in and do they want to be retrained in that thing?

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