A Christmas of Diamonds and Coal

[NVMojo]

12/16/2005

Christmas is coming; the goose is getting fat. The economy grew 4.3 percent last quarter. The stock market is up. Corporate profits are surging. Jobs are increasing. And unemployment is holding steady at 5 percent.

However…

As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pointed out recently, those national numbers don’t mean all that much to the average American. “It’s hard to convince people that the economy is booming when they themselves have yet to see any benefits from the supposed boom.” To back that up, he cited five straight years of median household income failing to keep pace with inflation, let alone improve. The bulk of the gains from expansion are going to the wealthy, he wrote, not to the middle-income or the poor.

Or to the rural, I might add.

In a speech to rural community development professionals at a NeighborWorks America conference in San Francisco last week, Director of the Center for the Study of Rural America and Vice President at the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank Mark Drabenstott put a very fine point on that. According to Drabenstott, three-quarters of the nation’s recent economic growth was captured by the top 10 percent of U.S. counties. Of the nation’s 3100 counties, just 310 account for 74 percent of growth in income, 74 percent of growth in jobs and 76 percent of growth in population.

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http://www.rupri.org/editorial/Default.asp?edID=135&ACTION=READ