Stimulating Sanpete County, Utah

By Christian Probasco, 9-01-09

	Caption: Pigeon Junction, Utah

The Salt Lake Tribune’s Thomas Burr wrote an informed feature about my very own Sanpete County a couple weeks ago. The gist of it could be paraphrased as a question: “what effect has Washington’s multi-gogillian dollar bailout had on one of Utah’s backest backwaters, and by extension, all the other hick counties throughout the U.S., and the employment rate therein?” Hard to tell, he concludes. There’s evidence the stimulus has helped Sanpete County and there’s the possibility that once the stimulus money runs out, the economy there (here) is going to fall on its face.

I’m surprised that anybody working for the Tribune (“Our motto: we spit in the face of every fundamentalist, ignorant, intolerant, drooling, climate-change denying, hog-killing redneck outside the liberal enclaves of Salt Lake City and Park City”) would treat the subject fairly. (Salt Lake’s other major newspaper, the Deseret News, which is owned by the LDS Church, has been getting in on the act, too.)

But I digress. Here’s the issue Burr’s article doesn’t address—not because he missed it, but because it wasn’t the story’s focus: Sanpete, a conservative county, exists because of a constant influx of state and federal monies. That’s right: our politicians, just like most politicians, are good at acquiring the fruits of other people’s labors. In our case, however, it isn’t just icing on the cake but the cake itself. As one of the article’s commentators, “Science not Superstition” puts it:

“This is nothing new for Sanpete County. They live and die by federal and state subsidies. I think it’s very interesting that their unemployment rate is 6.3% and the poverty rate is 16.2%....tons of people there live off of food stamps and welfare especially polygamist families. Kind of an area that makes no sense having any sort of population.”

Even though most of stimulus money is going to cities along the Wasatch Front, which have more political clout, we are benefiting too. Burr mentions a crossroads called Pigeon Hollow, which is being re-asphalted with stimulus cash. The road from the Hollow to Spring City wasn’t nearly as bad as the article lets on, but who cares? The money is trickling down to the rest of us from the individuals and companies fixing our roads and constructing buildings for the county and its cities with state and federal subsidies, and a lot of the state subsidies are paid for with federal money. Utah’s rural population has benefited from federal largess since the Great Depression, when much of the state was on federal life support. Back then, the feds purchased herds of cattle and shot them. They even bought out whole towns and demolished them because it was cheaper than continuing to make welfare payments to almost everyone living there.

It makes more sense for our leaders here to go after money appropriated from productive businesses elsewhere (also propped up by Chinese “communists” and borrowed against the sweat of our grandchildren’s grandchildren) than to try to attract big business and/or big money here, which comes with its own set of problems (research “Park City, Utah” if you want to know).

Our leaders might argue they’re using the tax money to stimulate sustainable private enterprise, which will eventually add to the local tax base so eventually we won’t need other people’s money to support us. But if that were the case, for as long as we’ve been on the receiving end, we should be living in the economic capital of the West by now. And if there are legitimate business opportunities here, why not petition the money from capitalist sources directly, rather than the government, which forcibly extracts it from them?

The main thrust of the commentaries after ‘Science’s’ input is that the county is filled with hypocrites “who all voted for Bush.” How short these responder’s memories are! Bush was the biggest (and hopefully last) of the big-government “conservatives,” working hard with other faux-conservatives in Congress to swell the now-globular public teat. The difference between the neocons and the liberals currently occupying the White House and majorities in both houses is that the former preferred just to raise debt unto the heavens with greater spending while the latter will at least contemplate the eventual need for cripplingly higher taxes. 

It is not clear to me why the citizens of Sanpete County would be hypocrites for sucking on the above-mentioned protuberance after having voted for a big-spender like Bush. Perhaps the Tribune’s angry readership thinks the stimulus was only meant for Democrats. More likely they figured rural conservatives would be too ethical or ignorant to game the system.

Once your money leaves your pocket, you have no control over how it’s spent. Politicians might promise that your taxes will go toward improved health-care or Social Security or some other program which should enrich your life but the money is just as likely to be diverted into the nation’s bloated military or its contractors or the economies of redneck counties like Sanpete or even new intelligence programs for spying on the taxpayers who fund them. A future president, working with a Democratic-majority Congress, might even conceivably agree to give over $700 billion of it ($2,333 for every person in the U.S.) away to a few of the filthily filthy-rich Wall Street firms they work for, (among other entities) ostensibly to prevent the economy from tanking . And those uber-capitalistic hypocrites would probably accept it, too.