A steel plant at the edge of this riverside town played a pivotal role in the family history of Sen. JD Vance.
The plant, Vance wrote in his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” was nothing less than an “economic savior” for his grandparents. A steady job there for his “Papaw” is what lifted his grandparents “from the hills of Kentucky into America’s middle class.”
Its future looks bright too, thanks in part to a grant of up to $500 million from the Biden administration. The money is aimed at helping its owners replace a coal-fired blast furnace so that steel can be produced with clean hydrogen and natural gas — improvements that would cut climate and air pollution and help ensure the plant stays open for another generation.
But the political benefits for the Biden administration — and by extension Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee — are less clear. This is true not just in Middletown but in similar communities across the country that are on track to receive funding from either the Inflation Reduction Act or the bipartisan infrastructure law, arguably the two biggest domestic accomplishments of President Joe Biden’s time in the White House.
Both measures remain largely unknown to the public, polling has shown. Perhaps as worrisome for Harris is that the federal investments may not do much to break the country’s partisan divide, even in places that have benefited from the spending.
I have heard that, in the UK, there was a correlation between areas that receiving EU funding and areas that voted most heavily for Brexit.
The UK government did not keep up that funding.
We should start listening to these people then and start giving them what they’re asking for: No help at all and an expectation that these chucklefucks “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps” like they’ve told everyone the fuck else for a hundred years.
You keep voting to get no help? Okay, you got it. We’ll never help your stupid asses again. That’s what you wanted, right? To succeed by your own hard work and nothing else? Let’s see how it works out for you considering we’ve been propping up your economic dead weight areas for decades.
As a taxpayer, I’m more than happy to stop giving these fucking losers money if they keep saying they don’t want any of it.
So let British Steel fucking die and let these people eat their own fucking words and deeds. Cry me a fucking river, this is what you voted for.
I keep saying it, the US should split up in two countries so the red States can finally become the third world country they want to be.