For Trump and Vance
In “Hillbilly Elegy” JD Vance wrote about the steel Plant in MIddletown, Ohio that rescued his family from poverty and brought them into the middle class. It’s still there:
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.
Interviews with more than three dozen people across Middletown over three days in late July revealed that few people knew about the grant. Of those who did, a handful applauded the Biden administration but several people said it didn’t matter or credited someone else.
The federal funding “doesn’t really change anything,” said Tyler Kirby, who sat outside the steel plant on a simmering July night, eating a hamburger and waiting for the start of his 12-hour overnight shift fixing cranes.Kirby said he planned to vote for former President Donald Trump, who chose Vance last month as his running mate atop the Republican presidential ticket.“I don’t really look for the government to do anything for you,” he said. “It’s more like just stay out of my way.”
Both Trump and Vance have attacked the Inflation Reduction Act as a “green new scam” and promised to repeal or weaken it. The Middletown plant could become collateral damage if they attack the legislation broadly and if funding for the project has not been distributed by early next year. care about the material“I will terminate Kamala Harris’s green new scam and rescind all of the unspent funds, give all of the unspent funds back to building roads, bridges and give it back to the government,” Trump said at a North Carolina rally last week.
It’s just weird to me that people don’t care about the material benefits they get from good government policies but they just don’t. It’s an attitude not a rational political ideology.
The article goes on to explain that the pollution caused by the plant is unhealthy and there are, at least, a few people who are concerned, like a young mother who confronts black soot on her lawn and all over her car every day. She knows it’s not good for her family and when told about the plant improvements indicates that she might vote for the Democrats. But that seems to be an exception to the rule.
According to the article, most people don’t know or care about it and those that do either assume that it’s Trump or Vance’s doing or think Trump won’t actually cancel the project as he is promising. They just like Trump even if it means the plant that is the lifeblood of the community loses the retrofitting that will keep it going.
The Democrats will keep doing the right thing even if they don’t get any credit for doing it because they remember that the most vulnerable among us — kids, the elderly and disabled — don’t deserve to live in poverty or become sick just because the people around them refuse to vote in their interest. It’s galling but it’s the only moral choice.