A Report from Flyover Land

Rolling Stone has an interesting feature on Lima, Ohio.  It pretty well captures the sad decline of a minor city in the industrial Midwest.  It also discusses Tea Party loon and congressman for Lima, Jim Jordan:

Jordan has made a myriad of public statements about what he's called the ''arrogant and out-of-control federal government,'' a perspective that – be it rooted in genuine frustration or in the perspective of right-wing media – has now become synonymous with the white working class, a group that's held fast to these ideals since the Reagan era. Jordan's own father, a longtime plant worker for General Motors and a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, was a Reagan Democrat who, having switched parties in 1980, never swung back. In the mid-Nineties, he retired from GM and started a business making handcrafted bows for hunters. He now listens to Rush Limbaugh. ''He's as conservative as they come,'' says Jordan.
In Jordan's view, Lima's future lies in the businesses it already has: oil, chemicals, heath care, construction. I mention alternative energy and Shawn Smith, who – just as Jordan says his father once advised him as a kid – worked hard, set a goal and trusted that good things would happen. Except, in Smith's case they didn't. ''For every one of those examples, we have examples of what we do have happening,'' Jordan says. ''I'm 100 percent for green energy. I'm for ethanol, I'm for wind power, that's all great. But I don't believe in picking winners and losers by giving tax breaks to some industries and not to others. You don't want bureaucrats in Washington deciding what works and what doesn't; you want people to decide in the grand marketplace we have.''
The problem with this argument, though, is that government exists in part to help manage economic crisis. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, whose 2012 book, The Price of Inequality, deconstructs the effects of income inequality, believes the only way out of the current crisis is a comprehensive overhaul of the economic structure. ''And that's where government has failed,'' he says. ''We have a few jobs in high-tech, but even Apple has only about 50,000 jobs, more than half of which are retail. That's not going to create a middle-class economy. You've got huge jobs in North Dakota from fracking, but that's not going to create the millions of jobs you need. Meanwhile, the right wing is condemning these communities to death. Their answer is the market will take care of it. Well, we've been watching, and it hasn't happened.''

So Jordan doesn't believe in giving tax breaks to some industries and not to others?  So he has worked hard to strip the oil and gas industry of tax breaks?  Actually, he might have, because his biggest belief is that we have to get rid of government spending so we can continue to cut taxes, since the last thirty years of economic history show no connection between tax cuts and job creation. Jordan means well, but he is just not very smart.  An excellent wrestler, but a bad public servant.  His policies help out rich folks on the coast, and hurt the struggling middle-class in his own part of the country.  But his faith in crackpot economic theories and bullshit remains strong.  At least he'll end up with a fat government pension.  Too bad most of his constituents won't.