Considering all of the rural areas and dirt-poor urban centers in the country, you have to be a little surprised that Jim Costa's Central Valley district is the worst in the country for quality of life.
Poverty, poor health and low graduation rates have put the San Joaquin Valley's 20th Congressional District dead last in a new national scorecard that ranks the well-being of residents.
Even notoriously grim Appalachia fares better than the congressional district that sweeps in Fresno, Kings and Kern counties, the study made public Wednesday shows. The assessment of health, education and income ranks the district 436th out of 436 districts nationwide.
CA-20 has the lowest rate of college graduates in the country, just 6.5%. The median annual salary is just $16,767, and life expectancy is 4.5 years lower than in rich, high well-being areas like the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It's an appalling set of numbers.
We know the challenges in this district. Factory-style farming has lowered the air quality and increased the public health risks. As income inequality stratifies, places like the Central Valley get left behind, even more so in a California with a 6.9% unemployment rate. A lack of development into 21st-century jobs causes a brain drain, and higher energy prices cripple rural America.
And there's a residual benefit. A dirt-poor district is a district that doesn't vote heavily or pay much attention to politics, paradoxically so since they need to the most. And so we get Representatives like Jim Costa, whose district has the lowest participation rates in the entire state. Which means he can vote the wrong way on issues like FISA or war funding and not get much feedback about it from a constituency that's struggling to survive. In this context, his desire to return federal funds to the district or improve quality of life would seem to be low, at best. It's a vicious circle: poverty breeds inattention, inattention breeds bad lawmakers, bad lawmakers have trouble improving poverty.
We need less legislators like Jim Costa who seem more interested in pleasing their corporate contributors than the suffering citizens in their own districts. The problem is how to reach a low-information constituency, and how to make that connection, that sustained political power and engagement is vital if we want to end poverty and build the post-carbon, post-agrarian economy that would lift up whole regions like the Central Valley. |
