We learned an important lesson last week: leave the fish tales to the experts. You know, like the Whopper in the White House.
Instead of using all my words on another week of lies dribbling from the Oval Office, I'm going to address some facts just released from the Appalachian Regional Commission.
These are facts that concern us directly in Pike County and are shared by sibling counties in the state. Facts that fly in the face of the MAGA/War on Coal crowd.
There's a reason the conservative lapdogs are trying to scare the beejesus out of you with words like socialism and illegals and Ocasio-Cortez. It's because billionaires becoming trillionaires, 22 sexual assault accusations, and dying kids in cages don't make much of a case for America becoming greater.
The truth is they spelled 'grate' wrong and that's not really 'great' at all.
According to the latest report from the ARC, Kentucky's Appalachian counties are scraping the bottom with the economy getting worse since Cadet Bonespurs took office. So much for putting miners back to work.
Either that war on coal is harder to defeat than advertised or--horrors--it was a hoax to get you to vote for a party that cares more for Chinese and Russian money than American people.
Here are the statistics for Pike County. The latest per capita income is $33,078, a decrease from the previous year. That is about $5000 lower than the state average and a whopping $16,000 under the national average. Those numbers include all income sources.
Take away federal and state support income (social security, medicare, etc) for the per capita market income (PCMI) and we're only at $19,445. That's less than half of the national average for PCMI.
Our 3 year unemployment average is 9.8%, nearly double the national unemployment rate of 4.8% . Our poverty rate is at 26.4%, also nearly double the national rate of 14.6%.
Pike county is designated as a "distressed" county by the ARC and the only thing good about that is we are eligible for more ARC grants than we used to be. Nearly half of the 80 "distressed" counties in America are in Appalachian Kentucky.
If our senator and majority leader Yertle McConnell lived in Coal Run, we'd certainly be showing higher per capita numbers. One would think the PCMI would, too, but most of his income is from foreign governments which is kind of like social security but not at all like socialism.
Yertle's wife, aka beard, Elaine Cho is the daughter of a Chinese shipping magnate and they've made a few extra fortunes bringing all those MAGA hats and I-Phones to our shores. For some reason, Trump didn't put new tarriffs on those items.
But don't place blame. There's no way our Republican Senator, Congressman, Governor or Oval Office Fraud could be responsible for Pike County actually getting worse off since the inauguration. A republican controlled Frankfort has no responsibility at all, just ask them.
They'll be quick to tell you. It's socialism. It's illegals. It's Ocasio-Cortez. It's certainly not policies that only benefit millionaires. If you'd just hold still, it'll all trickle down on you soon enough.