West Virginia, Ever More Unequal and Not a Nice Place to Live, Either

It seems that ripping up all their mountains for the coal that lies underneath doesn’t do West Virginians much good at all. A quick look at the news today reveals that only a few benefit from the commerce and resources of the Mountain State, and for most of the West Virginia’s residents life remains just as crappy as ever.

            A report from the Economic Analysis and Research Network, a nonprofit research center in Washington, D.C., found that more than half of West Virginia’s income growth over the past three decades went to the state’s top one percent of taxpayers. The report is titled “The Increasingly Unequal States of America: Income Inequality by State, 1917 to2011” and was released this past Wednesday.

            In some ways it could be worse. In four states, Nevada, Wyoming, Michigan, and Alaska, it was only the one percent to experience any increase in income. Average folks in West Virginia received at least some increase in their incomes. The top one percent nonetheless took home the lion’s share, 53 percent, of the income gains in the Mountain State in the past 30 years.

The folks over at Gallup have been tracking the overall well-being of Americans since 2008. For the fifth year in a row West Virginia has ranked dead last. The survey looks at things like personal life evaluation, emotional health, work environment quality, physical health, the practice of healthy behaviors, and access to basic necessities. Except for work environment quality, West Virginia ranked last on all indices used in the survey. On a scale of 0 to 100, 100 being the absolute highest quality possible, the highest state ranking was that of North Dakota, with a score of 70.4. West Virginia scored a 61.4. The next lowest ranking state was Kentucky, with a score of 63.0.

So things are crappy in West Virginia. But there are still people who want to put a positive spin on a revealing study like this. This piece from WCHS, an ABC affiliate in the Charleston-Huntington, West Virginia area, portrays the study’s findings in the context of a “controversy” that is caused by “an out of state report knocking West Virginia.” Instead of examining the findings of the study and explaining them to the audience, the reporter, Stefano DiPietrantonio, sums up, “Despite our troubles, critics don’t know what they’re missing. And everywhere you look there are reasons to love West Virginia.” He conducts a few man-on-the-street interviews and reads a few twitter comments in which folks offer words of praise for West Virginia.

OK, I love West Virginia, too. That’s why I blog about it so much. But love should not blind you to some obvious problems. And, after the portrayal of the science linking smoking to lung cancer as a “controversy” and the science of global warming being a “controversy,” haven’t we wised up to this canard? Did they explain to DiPietrantonio in journalism school that a small collection of opinions and data are two different things?

Maybe it’s because they watch news programs like this in West Virginia that folks there are not marching in the streets demanding that their water be suitable for drinking.