The U.S. Census Bureau is out with its latest figures on income and poverty in the United States. The report makes glum reading for the country as a whole and for the Midwest in particular.
The quick headline is that income has slipped and poverty increased everywhere since the recession began in 2007, but that's not exactly news. The real news is that average Americans -- the persons in the middle, where the middle class lives -- are worse off than they were ten years ago, and almost exactly where they were thirty years ago.
In other words, a whole generation of Americans has seen no increase in its standard of living.
Any time a Midwestern company announces it wants to (1) move, (2) stay, (3) grow, (4) shrink, (5) hire, (6) fire, (7) come or (8) go, you just know that some government or governments will throw money at it to persuade it to do what it was going to do anyway.
As we've written in earlier posts, Midwestern states are doing this more and more in a desperate attempt to hold on to investment and jobs. Cities do it, too, none more vigorously than Chicago, which has just done it again, giving $3.1 million to a steel company which may or may not need the money.
We've written in past postings about the inability of Midwestern state governments to meet the challenges of a globalizing economy. For years, these state governments have been too small, too parochial, too dominated by rural interests to respond to the real needs of a global and urbanizing society.
Now, they're just too broke.
This is a national problem, not just a Midwestern one. But the Midwest, which depended for so long on a now vanished industrial basis, is perhaps deeper in the hole than other states and needs more desperately to find solutions, not only to recover from the current recession but to restructure its entire economy.
Everyone who's studied the Midwestern economy agrees that strictly local solutions don't work, and it's time to work regionally. Everyone also agrees that Midwesterners are just too ornery by nature to accept the cooperation that regionalism requires.
It's beginning to look as though everyone is only half right. Regional arrangements are sprouting like corn in June. It's too early yet to say what they'll yield, or how deep their roots go. But for now, regionalism looks like an idea whose time has come.
We've written about some of these projects in other posts, but it's an encouraging exercise to review this progress. At the least, it shows that Midwesterners, after years in denial over the state of their economy, have awakened to the realities of coping in a global economy.
