Rural Economy Restoration

AJC 6/19/18 page a1 article “South Georgia’s anger spurs effort to secede” states the obvious. You can earn a living farming if you have a good paying job in town.  Rural counties and cities in the US were the beneficiaries of small manufacturing plants from the 1950s to the 1990s and the farmers could have a good paying job in town. In 1993, the passage of NAFTA heralded to exodus of manufacturing from the US to low wage countries. US Rural counties lost their manufacturing plants from 1993 to 2017.

US rural counties have farmers, retirees and school teachers and county government employees. There are some truck drivers and electric company linemen, In the rural cities of these counties we have some retail shops, grocery stores, gas stations, auto mechanics, churches, barber shops, beauty shops, a city hall, a police department, a fire department and family-owned restaurants. The lucky counties have doctors, dentists and nurses, but lots of hospitals have closed.  When they had a manufacturing plant, the jobs for 100 or more residents made a big difference in the economy.

Trumps victory in 2016 set up some expectations in rural America hoping they could regain their manufacturing plants. As rural Georgians look to the Gold Dome, they expect these “economic development” hounds to help bring manufacturing or something to their counties, but they don’t see any progress in rural Georgia. The State of Georgia has marketing support for farmers and agricultural product sales have increased, but this isn’t enough. Rural Georgians see the Gold Dome focused on Atlanta for the Amazon expansion and Savannah for the Harbor expansion. They see the Gold Dome chasing Casinos and other deals that would land in high population centers.

County officials have been trying to recruit manufacturing plants, but the expansion required for this to happen hasn’t happened yet. The advancements we need now would upgrade and harden our electric grid and protect our digital devices from intrusion, but our power companies don’t have the money and hardening our electronics could take a while.

We already know how to build completely automated plants, but it requires very high volume, high speed processes to make it profitable. This is how we make light bulbs, paper diapers, toilet paper and smart phones. These plants have low labor cost and 300 technicians can run plants that would require 3000 employees except for the automation. The US should be a perfect country for this kind of manufacturing, but the companies have these plants in other countries.

We already have “pick and place” robots smaller companies can buy and these robots don’t require programming skills to operate them. These robots allow companies to respond to surprise large orders, because the robots can be set up to work 24/7.

Rural Georgia is largely Republican. They don’t like the Republicans in the Gold Dome, because they vote and act like Democrats. They send their favorite sons to represent them, but they see them swept away to climb on whatever band-wagon the Establishment RINOs direct them to. These are the real Republicans who are reformers and they are the 45% of the Republican Delegates who vote for Alex Johnson to lead the GA GOP at every Georgia GOP Convention since 2013. The big city Republicans continue to dominate in Georgia and they don’t like reformers.

We saw the jobs pour in to Georgia in the 1980s, but the electronics industry was driving it. We moved to Georgia to support the PC and related programmable logic controller business made possible by the advances made in semiconductors. We followed this with a total retooling of telephony. This created a surge in the US economy based on new product launch effort in several industries that lasted for 30 years. It started to wind down after 2000 and died in 2008. This electronics advance quadrupled productivity and that created 40 years of economic growth.

To know when the next new product launch surge will occur again, you have to look at technology advances in necessary products.  What we have now is the clean-up needed to maintain our digital lives. This includes fool-proof security on our electronic devices and that’s a job for software and IT developers hired by banks, the power company and everybody else who relies on our electronic infrastructure.

There is one way to bring manufacturing back to rural counties.  You go looking for a skilled tradesman who wants to establish and grow his own manufacturing business and he already has customers. If say, he is a master machinist and does outsourced machining for customers. If he wants to grow, he will be looking for a community college that has a good machining curriculum. If he finds it in your county, he will visit it to see if the faculty knows what they are doing. If it is nearby and his suppliers and customers are not far and he likes your county, he will buy a home and build a shop to work in. This is the one model I think will work for now and you really don’t need the state government to do anything and that is perfect for the state government you currently have in the Gold Dome. If you Chair your County Commission, you need to put this plan into effect.

I got to live in Salina Kansas for 8 years from 1975 to 1983. Salina is at the intersection of I-70 and I-35 in the middle of 82,278 square miles of wheat.

Salina was founded in 1858 as a trading post and rest stop for covered wagons pursuing Western expansion. It is nestled by the Smokey Hill River.  The railroad arrived in 1867 and the cattle trade arrived in 1872 amid the wheat farmers. By 1880, several mills were operating making Lee Jeans and other garments. Carriage makers and farm implement makers settled in. Salina became a “market” town with silos and grain companies.

In 1942 Salina was selected as the site location of Shilling Air Force Base. It covered 2,862 acres and boasts a runway 12,300 feet long.  It became a SAC base for B-52 bombers and brought another level of activity to the local economy. It closed in 1967 and the USAF established a “development authority” and leased space for manufacturing plants and maintained base housing for “waiting wives” and we all hired them.

When the base closed, the town fathers set out to recruit manufacturing plants. This is precisely what your county commissions and city council need to do right now in Georgia.

When I arrived in 1975, it had a population of 40,000 and had 20 manufacturing plants, a major trucking company and many small businesses. At the time manufacturing companies were looking for plant sites in “right to work” states in cities that fit their needs.

I loved Salina, it was just the right size and was full of real Republicans.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader