Measure of America Charts (Kansas City, California: universities, median income, property taxes)

[SW Missouri Dave]

For my fellow chart lovers, the Social Science Research Council has put online their research called American Human Development Project. You have to play with the chart to get the different info but its pretty cool. It includes all 50 states but I was focused on Missouri

Mapping the Measure of America

Observations - (by Congressional Districts - states) - northern rural Missouri scores higher than southern and urban St Louis and Kansas City score highest

By Congressional Districts - states - Health index - health index) northwest Missouri scores highest. Note - Kansas City Missouri scores very low, while Kansas City, Kansas scores very high

You can expect to live 76 years in Kansas City, Missouri - 79 years in St Louis, MO and somewhere in between in the rest of the state.

The median income in northwest Missouri is $30,301 while in southeast Missouri it is $21,102.

And this one surprised me. The ratio of people using food stamps was the same in rural Southwest Missouri district as it was in the Kansas City district, with the St Louis district lower than any other part of the state.

Like I said you have to play with it to get what you are looking for but if you have time to kill, its very interesting. If you want to live a long time, you should probably move to southern Florida, southern Texas, southern Arizona, southern California or western Minnesota (huh ?). And if you are determined to live in Missouri and want to live a long time, better move to St Louis.

The most interesting chart, IMO, is the Heath Index - Health index - by Congressional Districts. The nationwide disparity is shocking.

[misplaced1]

Lots of great data, thanks for posting!

[LookinForMayberry]

Originally Posted by SW Missouri Dave

The nationwide disparity is shocking.

As we traveled the country from Aug '08 - '10, we saw disparity in all regards. There are few areas doing well in any regard, and none doing well in all regards.

At first I thought it was because of the economy at the time, but I started noticing how the decline we were seeing was older than the present economic situation could account. I started asking locals what happened and got these answers:

"The plant shut down in the 60s, ... the 70s, ... the 80s, ...."

The country is full of displaced workers that were never prepared to move to new industries, because most of their local governments never did anything to counter the exodus of jobs. Younger workers from affluent families (who were able to still get an education) have managed to gain jobs in growing industries, but mostly even the young are poorly prepared. The older Americans are the worse hit, because so many choose to keep waiting for that plant to re-open.

As a nation, we've pandered to large corporations and let them take their toll, leaving us to clean up after them. Our tax revenues remain funded only by lower paying service-level jobs and property taxes, which recently have dried up. Still, there are hungry, homeless, and sick to care for -- in even greater numbers.

Meanwhile we give the same large businesses tax breaks so they can move jobs overseas, and then we pay their new overseas suppliers with American dollars to get the products we used to build, and increase our debt to those countries.

And we allowed it all to happen.

[GraniteStater]

^
One rep point coming up!

[cp1969]

And we allowed it all to happen.

There isn't anything you or I or anybody else could have done to stop it. You can't legislate prosperity, it has to happen on its own.

[GraniteStater]

Originally Posted by cp1969

There isn't anything you or I or anybody else could have done to stop it. You can't legislate prosperity, it has to happen on its own.

Way too many jobs have been eliminated, downsized, offshored, and outsourced. We have a ton of counties in the US with poverty rates above 20%. Lots of blame to go around, though.

[cyrano]

You can't guarantee prosperity by a particular course of action, but you can help it along. Two examples of the latter are Austin and the North Carolina Research Triangle, where the cities and universities made large investments of money and planning in tech industries. In Austin especially, the results differed from what was planned (they planned for AMD and IBM, they got Dell), but the town-gown partnerships paid off.

I'm not hopeful that a similar thing can happen in Missouri, though, because here, economic incentives take the form of bribes to lure businesses here or brother in law deals to further enrich the existing elite. I'd love to be proven wrong.