Author: Charles Hayslett
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Rural Georgia never recovered from the Great Recession. Now comes COVID-19
There’s a persistent pattern I’ve noticed in various buckets of economic, population, and education data, but I’ve never fully connected the dots or taken a stab at suggesting what it all might mean. Now seems like a good time to do that. Rural Georgia — and especially Middle and South Georgia — got the crap…
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Covid-19 may stir a perfect storm for rural Georgia
When I began work on this project some years back and came up with the title “Trouble in God’s Country,” I was thinking about things like the urban-rural divide in economics, education, healthcare, and politics. It never crossed my mind that a new plague might come along that would stir up what might be a…
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Three-fourths of Georgia’s GDP now produced north of the gnat line
About three months ago I stumbled onto a December 2018 report from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) that included four years of newly developed county-level gross domestic product (GDP) data. BEA billed that new set of data as a prototype and announced it would be coming out with an expanded report in December…
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Political common ground hard to find in Georgia. Literally.
A few days after Georgia’s 2018 elections, I did a quick analysis and wrote a piece positing that the state’s widening urban-rural divide went beyond economics and education and extended to politics. Rural areas seemed to be going more and more Republican while urban and suburban areas were trending more Democratic. Recently I’ve finally gotten…
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Rural Georgia: Doing its part to send Metro Atlanta kids to college
One recurring theme in my Trouble in God’s Country research is that Metro Atlanta is paying the lion’s share of taxes in Georgia while consuming a much smaller portion of social services, such as Medicaid and food stamp benefits. Rural Georgia, generally speaking, doesn’t cover its costs for those services. In at least one regard, however,…
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The real problem with HB 887: it starts in the wrong place
Yesterday I posted an initial piece dissecting some of the mechanics of House Bill 887, the Georgia Communications Services Tax Act, and said I’d loop back for a second swing at “the real problem” with the bill. Here goes. The real problem is that it proposes to serve the wrong areas – or at least…
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The rural broadband train arrives at the Gold Dome. Grab your wallet.
Last May I was asked to present some of my Trouble in God’s Country research to the opening session of the House Rural Development Council down in Tifton. The first question I got after completing my presentation was about something I hadn’t even touched on – the idea of running broadband to rural Georgia. The…
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Thanks, Mr. President, for giving us a new way to think about Georgia’s declining regions
By Charles Hayslett File this under every-cloud-has-a-silver-lining. President Trump’s characterization of Haiti and various South American and African countries as “shitholes” may have torpedoed a DACA deal, triggered a global diplomatic uproar and made it more likely that the federal government will shut down this weekend. On the bright side, it also gives us a…
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South Georgia vs. Gwinnett County
Here’s an easy way to understand the widening gap between Metro Atlanta and the rest of Georgia. Compare all 56 counties of interior South Georgia to Gwinnett County alone. Gwinnett County’s 2013 population was estimated at 859,304 – just under three-fourths of the 1.16 million people living in our 56-county South Georgia region. But despite…