Rural areas have higher percentage of uninsured

The share of rural people under 65 without health insurance increased 8 percent during the recession, and is now higher than in cities or suburbs, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Before 2005, rates of uninsured were about the same in rural and urban areas, but during the recession, the rate of uninsured rural people rose to 18.4 percent, compared to 17.7 percent in urban areas, Bill Bishop of the Daily Yonder reports.

The data show "a huge variation in the percentage of uninsured by state," Bishop writes. In 16 states, at least one in five rural residents under 65 didn't have health insurance. From highest to lowest, they were: Texas, Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Georgia, Idaho, Colorado, Mississippi, Montana, South Carolina, Arkansas, Oregon, Louisiana and North Carolina. The rate of rural people without insurance was higher than in urban areas in all but six states: Illinois, California, Nevada, Connecticut, Florida and New York. (Read more)

House right wing's focus on food-stamp cuts complicates efforts to pass Farm Bill

A food-stamp fight will complicate efforts to pass a Farm Bill, reports Politico's David Rogers, perhaps the best in the business at explaining the politics of American agriculture and food policy.

To get the bill through the House, Rogers writes, Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) "must go to the right of the Democratic-controlled Senate, which took only $4.5 billion from SNAP," or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which the food-stamp program was dubbed in the 1996 welfare reform bill. "But in trying to show some deft and care, Lucas is meeting stiff resistance in his own committee, where nearly two-thirds of the Republicans are freshmen from the large 2010 class so influenced by the rise of the tea party."

Getting little or no help from House GOP leaders, Lucas has abandoned his hope "to build on the decades-old farmer-food stamp coalition, which has helped sustain support for rural agriculture in the more urban House," Rogers reports. "Instead, the path chosen by the GOP is a political dead-end in the Senate and could become a nightmare for farm and crop-insurance interests trying to fend off tighter income limits on subsidies." The bill would eliminate direct cash payments to farmers but create a larger program for crop insurance.

Food stamps are the largest single part of the bill. The right wing wants to repeal "categorical eligibility," which appears to have allowed states to enroll more people in the program, ballooning its costs. Rogers calls it "an administrative shortcut that’s become far more common since the economic downturn in 2008," putting more people in need of food stamps. The impending House approach "could drive at least 1.8 million people off the rolls and has twice been rejected by the Senate." Lucas and Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn., the committee's ranking Democrat, want to raise food-stamp eligibility to 140 percent of the poverty threshold to compensate for repeal of categorical eligibility.

Rogers sums up: "Seldom have the haves and have-nots had so much common stake in one bill. Consider that for a family of three, the distinction between 130 percent of poverty and 140 percent . . . comes down to those earning $24,817 vs. $26,726 a year — about $37 more a week. That’s less than the annual direct cash subsidies for two acres of corn today. And this in the context of a debate where it was considered a major breakthrough for the Senate to trim the rate of crop insurance subsides for producers with adjusted gross incomes in excess of $750,000." (Read more)

As local governments picked up more of school tab, gap between poor and rich districts widened

The Great Recession has changed state formulas for funding education, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's annual Public Education Finances report released last week. According to Ben Wieder, reporting in Stateline, the news service of the Pew Center for the States: For the first time in 16 years, local governments picked up a higher share of the education bill than the states, while the federal government picked up more than 10 percent of the tab. Data was from the 2009-10 school year. State funding did decrease by 6.5 percent from the previous year, according to the bureau, the biggest decrease since reporting began in 1977. That drop was accompanied by an unprecedented increase in federal funding, largely stimulus dollars, that in many cases propped up state spending. Taken together, this means that education funding across the country increased by a half percent, while per-pupil funding increased by 1.1 percent.

Michael Griffith, senior school finance analyst at the Education Commission of the States, says local funding wasn't hurt early by the recession, but it declined as lower property assessments translated into lower local property tax collections. That decline came as state budgets were starting to recover, compensating for some of the losses in local revenue. Griffith expects that the next couple of census reports will show a fuller picture of the impact of the recession, particularly numbers for the past school year, in which federal stimulus dollars expired, Wieder writes. Declining state revenues increased the distance between the haves and the have-nots, Griffith says, because wealthier districts in many parts of the country were better able to make up for fewer state dollars.

Report: Rural manufacturing, once so hard hit, looks to be rebounding with global growth

According to the Census Bureau, rural communities have lost roughly a third of their factory jobs since 1995. The recent recession has only made this worse, with one out of every eight rural factory jobs disappearing in 2009 alone. But, writes Jason Henderson in The Main Street Economist's report: Rebuilding Rural Manufacturing, rural manufacturing has rebounded  with a vengeance in the past two years. "Stronger global economic growth and a drop in the value of the dollar from its highs a decade ago has boosted U.S. manufactured exports. Rural factories have tapped global markets and a booming agricultural sector to spur rising employment and incomes. While the prospect of additional strength at rural factories remains promising, the rebuilding of rural America's manufacturing base rests on the retooling of rural factories with skilled workers for competition in global markets," Henderson writes.

Henderson, who is vice president and Omaha branch executive at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, reports that "economic growth in developing countries has spawned demand for commodity-based products." Rural manufacturing jobs have jumped 3.8 percent in 2011, double the national rate, with workers putting in more than 40 hours a week through the first quarter of 2012. Such strong labor demand has fueled strong wage growth making weekly earning rise more than 7 percent over the past year. Read the report.