By Zaldy Dandan – Variety Editor
RECENTLY, The Wall Street Journal sent a reporter to McDowell County, West Virginia, to interview — among other residents — Carolyn Owens, who was nine years old when her family became one of the first to receive food stamps in the United States
“Her father could no longer work in the coal mines that pock the mountains here after an injury. He’d wait at the local government office to collect food coupons, part of a program launched by John F. Kennedy in 1961 to help alleviate the shocking poverty he witnessed while campaigning across Appalachia.
“Owens would walk home from school to find peanut-butter sandwiches with a sliver of banana waiting for her and her 10 brothers and sisters. ‘Those sandwiches were like ice cream for us,’ said Owens, now 73.”
In the decades since, the Journal reported, “the federal government has poured more than $3.6 billion into trying to ease the hardship in McDowell County, according to estimates from the Economic Innovation Group, using current dollars. That doesn’t include the roughly $13 billion more in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid payments.
“It hasn’t worked.”
In the heart of America’s War on Poverty, the Journal added, “some two-thirds of households with children still receive food stamps, among the nation’s highest rates, and the estimated median household income hovers around $35,000. Nonfarm employment has plummeted 78% since 1975, according to data compiled by West Virginia University economist John Deskins, as the coal that once powered this rugged place is now mostly mined with machines, if at all, and no other industry has replaced it. The county has lost 67% of its residents over those years — the largest drop in West Virginia — with its population dwindling from just over 51,000 to roughly 17,000.”
With “little faith left in government to break the cycle of poverty, those who remain say it’s up to them to forge a brighter economic path.”
But will the government — quick to impose growth-stifling measures — allow them?
Still, if all else fails, they can always relocate elsewhere in the United States.
Happily, that is also an option for U.S. citizens in these remote, small, typhoon-prone, economically troubled islands — nearer to Japan than California and roughly 5,700 miles from the U.S. West Coast.
In the newly established CNMI in February 1978, Variety reported that two-thirds of residents received food items from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. These included apple juice, rice, macaroni, corned beef, canned beans, peanut butter, canned tomatoes, vegetables and sardines, egg mix, vegetable shortening, evaporated milk, and mashed potatoes.
At the time, the government bequeathed by the U.S.-administered Trust Territory was the islands’ “main industry.” As a former American Trust Territory economist once put it: “We will hire them and they’ll sit at a desk. There won’t be very much to do, but we just can’t have them going out and sitting under a coconut tree somewhere. They’re going to have to sit there eight hours a day and do the typing or push the paper or whatever it is that has to be done in order to justify the pay.”
In August 1978, Variety reprinted a Washington Post report on the Trust Territory islands, of which Saipan was the capital:
“American trusteeship in Micronesia has created a society dependent on government jobs and benefits, an island welfare state whose people are so inundated with free handouts that they are abandoning even those elemental enterprises — fishing and farming — that they had developed before the Americans came.
“ ‘We’ve smothered them,’ agrees a veteran U.S. administrator with the trust territory government. ‘And it will take them a long time to come out from under this blanket.’
“ ‘It is awfully hard to see anything good that the United States has done in Micronesia,’ adds another American who has spent years here.
“More than 10,000 Micronesians — a third of the labor force — have government jobs, most of them with the territorial government, which oversees 3 million square miles of water and islands. The work is easy, the wages excellent by island standards, and the bosses undemanding.
“ ‘They’re really not required to do anything,’ says [a Palauan politician]. ‘They know they’ll get their paychecks, no matter what. No one takes attendance to see if they show up. They’re not accountable for any mistakes.’
“An American agrees: ‘Government jobs in Micronesia are looked upon as welfare. It sort of reminds me of a small Southern town in the United States where the courthouse crowd has everyone on the county payroll and they all just sit around the courthouse lawn all day.’ ”
Nearly half a century later, government dependency remains a cause of concern in these islands and other former Trust Territory districts. Recall the recent near panic over delays in the issuance of food stamps due to the partial U.S. government shutdown.
“The High Cost of Good Intentions,” indeed — to quote the title of John F. Cogan’s excellent 2017 book on the history of U.S. federal entitlement programs. Its central theme is that “the creation of entitlements brings forth relentless forces that cause them to inexorably expand.”
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