At the CNN Town Hall on Sunday night, Hillary had a gaffe — that is, a moment of honesty — in which she said, “We’re going to put a lot of coal companies and coal miners out of business.” This was, to be sure, followed up by a list of programs she has in mind to help those former coal miners and coal mining regions, but there it is.
As Mother Jones observes (yes, Mother Jones is a handy source here), coal is already being battered by competition from natural gas, now in abundance due to fracking, as well as very much at risk of further battering by the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, if these regulations, now held up in court, are ultimately implemented. At the same time, Clinton and Sanders have both pledged to end fracking — Sanders via an outright ban, and Clinton via regulations that she intends to be so onerous as to functionally be a ban as well — so that Mother Jones suggests that the coal industry might prosper after all.
But what about Clinton’s programs to help those regions (described in an earlier Mother Jones article to which the latter one links, and laid out in a policy paper here)?
Part of her plan is just to direct social welfare spending towards impacted miners and mining communities: promising that not just pension benefits (via the PBGC) but retiree healthcare benefits of future bankrupt coal or related companies will be provided by the federal government (note that companies pay “insurance premiums” into the PBGC already, but there is no equivalent for retiree medical), promising a reform of an existing “black lung” healthcare program, and promising additional funds for any school district impacted by a closed mine or other business.
But the remainder is a general economic development for coal mining regions. She promises new roads, bridges, airports, site remediation of coal mines, government-provided broadband internet, additional R&D spending at universities in coal-mining areas, and special tax credits for development in these areas. She promises to develop dams in Western mining areas (which is a surprise — I thought dams were being torn down, these days, for environmental reasons). And she promises a program to link up existing federal programs such as small business assistance, job training programs (plus her free community college/state college program), community health centers, arts and cultural development (e.g., tourism), and programs to improve the quality and energy efficiency of housing.
But how much sense does all of this make? You can’t replace coal mining with tourism. There aren’t enough tourists. You can’t develop economies by infusing government cash for housing programs, or job training programs, and, while healthcare assistance may well be needed, it’s not going to build the economy, except for an economy of service providers to government benefit recipients. Coal mining regions are in mountainous and, generally, sparsely populated areas — not prime locations for major corporations to locate. If the coal mines are shut down, there’s not much of an obvious draw to the region, no reason why any new industry or corporation would be drawn here rather than elsewhere. And, as it is, so far as I understand, there is already a migration from these areas by the young and ambitious.
So, what do you do?
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