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Why Are American Communities Dying?
Why Are American Communities Dying?
Most Americans who have been around for a while know life is nothing like it used to be. When someone wanted a job one was found with a little bit of searching. Today jobs are difficult to find, especially in small communities.
When I was growing up in the 70’s, there were several car dealers in my community. There were three tractor dealers and too many mom and pop stores to count. Today there are two used car dealers and the nearest tractor dealer is twenty miles away. So how is it that we now have more people, but fewer businesses to employ them?
A nations wealth is derived from having a product to sell. That wealth needs to circulate in towns and cities to compound the wealth effect and create jobs and businesses. When wealth is not created or it is siphoned off to other places, the wealth effect can not happen, and in many cases goes into reverse. A community needs a certain amount of service related jobs to function but it also needs some type of production jobs to bring in money from the outside. This can be mining , agriculture or manufacturing type jobs, but they must exist to insure a healthy economy.
America has two major problems today. A large amount of our production is done outside the country eliminating production jobs in local communities and many of the small local businesses that kept wealth within communities have been supplanted by large corporations that siphon wealth out of communities and send it to wall street.
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Top 10 Reasons to Read “Vermont Dollars, Vermont Sense
Top 10 Reasons to Read “Vermont Dollars, Vermont Sense
This week marks the official publication of Post Carbon Institute’s first handbook on local investment, written by myself and Gwen Hallsmith.
Vermont Dollars, Vermont Sense, builds on my 2012 book on local investment, Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity.” The new handbook presents 28 specific tools for promoting local investment, and presents examples of people, initiatives, and programs in Vermont carrying out each of them. We are now planning similar handbooks for several states in the Pacific Northwest, and hope that ultimately there will be an edition for every state in the nation.
Why did we start with Vermont? The state has a long history of community resilience, from local food and energy systems to town meetings. More recently, Vermonters have taken the lead in reclaiming that tradition, for example by setting a goal of 90 percent renewable power by 2050 (Burlington, the state’s largest city, has already hit that goal). We also were impressed with the state’s long embrace of local investment. One of the earliest and best examples was carried out by two ice cream entrepreneurs named Ben and Jerry in 1984, who insisted that shares in their initial public offering be owned solely by Vermonters.
Whether or not you live in Vermont, here are the top ten reasons you might want to take a gander at this handbook (Spoiler Alert: the #1 reason is that it’s free!):
(10) It’s Important – Americans are still putting almost 100 percent of their long-term savings into Wall Street, even though more than half the economy is made up of locally owned businesses that are highly profitable and competitive. If you think that Wall Street has too much power, then stop wishing for change, and start putting your money where your idealism is. This handbook will show you how.
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