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Thanks so much. Now to the episode.

Talking about rural America actually is one of our favorite subjects because it's such an important challenge for this country in particular.

One of the problems with these rural communities is that you have all this wealth that's actually generated but that wealth gets extracted out.

There's no good policy being promoted to actually keep some of that wealth in the community.

It's about having an opportunity to have a dignified middle class life in the town where you grew up.

From the offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitch Fork Economics, with

Nick Hanauer, a pointed conversation about who gets what and why, with one of America's

most provocative capitalists.

I'm Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.

I'm David Goldstein, Senior Fellow at Civic Ventures.

So Nick, one of the things we've talked about a number of times on the

podcast is the rising spatial inequality in the U.S.

The inequality between regions, between rural America, which lost a lot of jobs in the Great Recession and has not nearly recovered even before the pandemic hit.

And the urban areas like Seattle, which have been going gangbusters and doing great in the new economy.

And it really has come to the forefront recently in the COVID pandemic where you know just recently we're now seeing the pandemic really take hold in many rural areas in Washington State that's where most of the caseloads are growing, but that's happening throughout the country.

And it's not by accident.

No. You know, what's super sad is that there was an un sort of a slowly unfolding economic crisis in rural America and then COVID-19 came along and made it that much worse and made it I think you know maybe this is a good thing that much more obvious from the fragility of the local economies to the lack of health care available in those in those places it really has been for

most of rural America and I suspect it's going to get a lot worse, a total shit show.

And of course our Congress has been almost completely unhelpful,

...