2024 - Rural Indiana Economy
The issues that face Hoosiers, and America as a whole, are complex and they are all interconnected. The challenge is to find and cure the root causes and not just treat the symptoms.
When we watch the news and hear numbers as to the state of our national economy, we should be flourishing with record unemployment and GDP numbers. But as I travel around our very rural and small town district, visiting the places of my youth, I notice the economic decline of our hometowns. Gone are most of the banks, the IGA groceries, the hardware stores, the mom and pop five and dimes. All that is left in most towns are the post office, a gas station, a Dollar General, and a bar. The economic success of the nation has not spread evenly to every place, and rural Indiana is prime.
What happened?
In many ways we never left the Great Recession of 2008. Our GDP for the state lags .5% the rest of the nation. The five Indy Metro counties account for almost 40% of the state’s entire GDP growth.
Hoosiers in many small towns and rural areas face declining populations as area jobs are being lost. Half of the population growth in Indiana goes to Hamilton, Hendricks, and Marion Counties, and adding Allen, Johnson, Boone, Clark, Hancock, and Tippecanoe Counties accounts for 97% of that population growth. Since 1980, Delaware and Jay Counties have lost around 12% of their population, Randolph has lost 18%, and Blackford has lost 22%. Furthermore, Randolph, Blackford, and Jay Counties have between 10-15% of their populations who hold college degrees. People who hold college degrees have 65% higher salaries on average. This makes the tax burden on those who live in our counties higher because there are fewer people who make lower wages pay for the necessary services the county must provide.
If a rising tide raises all ships, why is rural Indiana lagging so far behind? Simply put, the Indiana Republican SUPERMAJORITY is actively scuttling the ship. The horrific policies that the Republican SUPERMAJORITY at the State House for the majority of time since 2008 have made it so that businesses do not want to locate in rural Indiana. To name just a few:
The Republican SUPERMAJORITY has attacked our education system making our brightest kids leave the state to never come back. We are 43rd in the rankings of our population with bachelor degrees. This reduces the pool of local employees that businesses want to hire making them choose elsewhere.
The Republican SUPERMAJORITY continues to not understand the health care crisis in our state. We have become the 10th worst state for health care mostly because of the explosion of costs. This is due to the consolidation of health care providers into fewer corporations which demand higher profits. Doctors have been forced into belonging to group practices owned by these corporations. Small town health care is collapsing including the closing of Blackford County Hospital. Businesses which are providing health care are less likely to locate where health care costs are out of control.
The Republican SUPERMAJORITY did nothing for too long on our infrastructure. The state of transportation in Indiana is startling. The sale of the Indiana Toll Road to a FOREIGN CORPORATION in 2006 left us without 2/3 of the funding for road repair because they had no plan to fund road repair. AFTER 12 YEARS in 2018, the Republican SUPERMAJORITY passed one of the highest gas taxes in the country to fund the crumbling roads and bridges. The work still isn’t done which is why we have detours for the detours. Our rural broadband infrastructure is just now beginning to receive the dollars to increase rural access, but this should have been done a decade ago. Businesses don’t want to locate someplace that they can’t get their product in and out or have their networks run on subpar internet service in rural areas.
It is time that we take the initiative and begin the rebuilding of our local rural economy. We need to be enacting policies which attract businesses to locate outside of the metro Indy area rather than policies which make it harder for businesses to locate here.
