Romney releases rural platform, criticizes Congress and Obama for lack of new Farm Bill

Mitt Romney released his rural platform today. "Like President Obama, the Republican's rural policy is all about agriculture," says the Daily Yonder. "Of course, most people in rural America have little to do with farming, but in a campaign short on substance, we'll take what we can get." (Des Moines Register photo)

The Yonder notes that the platform criticizes Congress for failing to pass a Farm Bill before recessing for the election season. That has created some heat for Republican members of the House from rural areas. In an appearance in Iowa yesterday, Romney also blamed Obama, saying "The president has to exert the kind of presidential leadership it takes to get the House and Senate together and actually pass a farm bill.”

The four main points of the platform, which is available here, are:

Implement effective tax policies to support family farms and strong agribusiness;

Pursue trade policies that expand upon the success of the agriculture sector, not limit it;

Create a regulatory environment that is commonsense and cost-effective; and

Achieve energy independence on this continent by 2020.

Did a pastor in your area endorse a candidate from the pulpit Sunday? It's a national story

In a move that could put their tax-exempt status at risk and result in fines, an estimated 1,500 pastors nationwide endorsed presidential candidates Sunday. The move was a challenge to the law prohibiting political endorsements by religious and other tax-exempt organizations, policed by the Internal Revenue Service. (Bloomberg News photo)

The goal of "Pulpit Freedom Sunday" was "to defy this rule and prompt the IRS to take action against a church that could become the basis for a court case to test whether the amendment infringes on constitutional rights to free religious and political speech," reported Jennifer Hawes of The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C. The event was first organized four years ago by the Christian group Alliance Defending Freedom. All participants pledged to film their sermons and send them to the IRS.

Rev. Steven Baines, religious outreach director for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told Hawes the political action "opens the door to politicizing our pulpits." The risk is that churches and pastors could become political fronts, he said. "They have freedom of speech. They can preach about their values, and we encourage pastors to preach about their values. But they cannot relate those to a particular candidate or party."

Participating pastors said they were taking part because their messages shouldn't be filtered through the IRS. But the average voter doesn't want pastors politicizing their sermons, according to a decade's worth of Pew Research Center polls, Hawes reported. In a July survey, 66 percent of people polled said churches and other places of worship should not endorse candidates. Even 90 percent of Protestant pastors polled in a May LifeWay survey said they shouldn't endorse from the pulpit. (Read more)

In California, there's a fight over rural residents paying a $150 fire-fighting tax

The fires out West are getting hotter, and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association thinks rural residents in California are bearing too much of the burden for fighting them. The group announced Thursday that it is suing to end a $150 annual state fire fee imposed on California's rural residents and want to obtain refunds for those who have already paid the fee.  Kevin Yamamura of the The Sacramento Bee reports that the group brought suit in a Sacramento Superior Court alleging that that the $150 annual fee, which the state began collecting in August, "amounts to a tax that was illegally approved without the necessary two-thirds majority of lawmakers." The tax applies to 825,000 rural homeowners.

Gov. Jerry Brown argues that it is legitimate to ask rural residents to pay higher costs for fire prevention in the wake of larger developments on once-rural lands that face greater wildfire risks. "This is putting a huge stress and strain and fear on rural property owners," Jarvis group President Jon Coupal said. Cal Fire spokeswoman Janet Upton said her organization thinks "it's unfortunate that (the Jarvis group) is trying to obstruct funding that we need for fire prevention. We strongly feel that prevention activities funded by the fee save lives and property." (Read more) 

Rural residents depend on papers for local news, but urbanites are more interested in local topics

Metropolitan, suburban, smaller town or rural, all types of places are big consumers of news -- be it local, national or international. But how and where we get that news and how much we "participate" in it differs between community types. And that may be more of a function of the digital and social media available to us than our desire to weigh in on the topics. Or so a recent study of local news and community types strongly indicates.

A just-released national survey conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that rural residents did indeed still rely on newspapers for most of their local news. Researchers speculated that is because most rural areas get little coverage from other media, and many "micropolitan" towns of fewer than 50,000 people have no television station.

However, they noted that "the choices about information acquisition are not necessarily the same in all communities. For instance, it might be the case in rural areas that the local newspaper and broadcast outlets are not online or have a very limited online presence and that is a determinant in whether residents get local information online or not."

And, perhaps surprisingly, researchers found that those who live in rural communities are "less interested in almost all local topics than those in other communities. The one exception is taxes. They are also are less likely . . . to say it is easier now to keep up with local information."

Interestingly, rural people were more likely than most to say they are willing to pay for local news content through a paid subscription to a local paper; 37 percent said so, a larger share than any but suburbanites, at 40 percent.

The study, co-authored by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and Internet & American Life Project, in partnership with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, also reported these findings:

• Urban and suburban residents on average use more sources of local news than their small town and rural counterparts and are more likely to consume local news on mobile devices.
• The most active “local news participators” also tend to reside in suburban and urban communities where they email local stories to others, post material on sites, comment, post or e-report.
• Suburbanites are most likely to use radio as a news source -- researchers postulated this might be a consequence of longer commutes. They are the most likely of the four distinct community types to use the Internet for information about local restaurants, businesses and jobs.

To read the full report, go here.

Regional network suggests Appalachian coal states put some severance tax dollars into endowments

A coalition of citizens' groups in Central Appalachia is recommending that Eastern coal states follow the example of their Western counterparts and put part of their severance-tax revenue into endowments that would permanently provide earnings to help their regional economies. Seven states in the West "use severance taxes to create permanent trust funds that can help state economies in the future," reports Paul J. Nyden for the Sunday Gazette-Mail in Charleston, W.Va. "Many of those funds add up to billions of dollars."

A study by the Central Appalachia Regional Network notes that severance taxes represent a significant portion of state government income in two Central Appalachian states: nearly 9 percent of state revenues in West Virginia and 3.3 percent in Kentucky. In four other states covered by the group -- Maryland, Ohio, Tennessee and Virginia -- severance taxes generate less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the states' total revenues.

CARN, a diverse group of regional organizations assembled and funded by the W.K Kellogg Foundation, proposed that a minimum of 1 percent of all severance taxes be placed into permanent endowments in each state. "This would not only help these states meet many of their economic challenges but ensure that future generations benefit from the mineral wealth that is in their communities," said Ted Boettner, executive director of the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. The CARN study is available here.

The Kentucky-based Mountain Association for Community Economic Development, which is not part of CARN, earlier this year suggested a similar plan financed by an increase in the severance tax. If Kentucky raised the tax to 5.5 percent from 4.5 percent, it could create more than $700 million in a fund by 2035, MACED said.

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.