The same old extraction and disinvestment won’t bring West Virginia’s revival

By Kelly Allen, West Virginia Watch

This article was originally published by West Virginia Watch, an independent, nonpartisan news service based in Charleston. You can make a donation here.

For as long as West Virginia has existed, the abundant natural resources beneath our feet have created wealth for outsiders, from the timber that built our nation’s railroads to the coal and natural gas that powered America, while poverty has plagued our own people. Our problem has never been a lack of prosperity, but that our wealth doesn’t tend to benefit the people who live here.

An 1884 report by the state’s Tax Commission provided a prophetic warning, “The wealth of this State is immense… the question is, whether this vast wealth shall belong to the persons who live here…or whether it shall pass into the hands of persons who do not live here and who care nothing for our State except to pocket the treasures which lie buried in our hills?”

A piece written in the Washington Post in April taps into an unfortunately common line of thinking that ignores all that, suggesting that West Virginia’s stubborn poverty is due to the generosity of federal anti-poverty programs — an assertion usually based on the implication that absent the safety net, families would simply work more and not be poor. This is a stale argument that isn’t just offensive — it is disproven. But it is a convenient distraction to ignore the real drivers of poverty: exploitative extraction, low wages and limited economic opportunity. Research backs up the case for a safety net, but so do our Appalachian values: our tradition of community care goes back centuries precisely because we’ve so often been stripped of opportunity by those who exploit our resources. 

Any thoughtful economic analysis of West Virginia should discuss its unique “resource curse,” a term for the inverse relationship between resource abundance and economic growth. Economies wholly dependent on volatile natural resources often experience long-term economic instability rather than prosperity given extractive industries’ boom and bust cycles and wealth extraction. During good times profits flow out of the state rather than bettering our hometowns or diversifying our economy before the resources are depleted.

The volatility means that while wages might temporarily increase during “booms,” they don’t create economic growth that sustains the “busts,” with mining communities experiencing lower incomes, higher poverty, poorer health outcomes, lower educational attainment and less diversified economies. That’s not because of an overly generous safety net but the extraction of wealth and resources from our towns. Take for instance McDowell County, long the largest producer of coal in the U.S., and now one of the poorest counties in the country making national news for lacking basic clean water infrastructure.

Our leaders have spent the last decade cutting basic services and protections to prioritize industry and income tax cuts, deregulation and privatization of basic public services, much like the Post op-ed authors call for. It hasn’t resulted in prosperity for our people. On the ground, residents see it less as a revival and more as a rural crisis.

West Virginia’s universal school vouchers’ program allows families who use private schools and homeschooling to pay for them with public taxpayer dollars. The state agency that runs the program says rather than expanding choice, about 90% of recipients were already in private school without the program. Tens of millions of taxpayer dollars have gone to unaccredited, unaccountable schools and entities outside of West Virginia and the cost continues to grow.

And it has come with unprecedented public-school closures (more than 70 since 2019) and underfunded rural schools and special education services. In community after community, residents beg for their schools to remain open. School officials say that without state changes to public school funding, they have no choice but to close. Meanwhile the exploding cost of the vouchers’ program has kept lawmakers from making needed investments in public schools. One might ask why lawmakers are prioritizing a private school system that reaches a small fraction of our children over the one that serves all of them?  Once again, it seems out-of-state efforts are behind the vouchers with national school choice interests pouring hundreds of thousands into state legislative races this year.

Similarly, the Post op-ed authors point to corporate data center development as a tool of economic revival. But most West Virginians see data centers as the next extractive industry allowing out-of-state interests to line their pockets with the wealth from our land and water while leaving us with higher electricity bills, chronic health problems and degraded land. Data centers create few permanent jobs so the primary benefit to communities is usually the tax revenue they generate. But in addition to generous tax breaks for developers, state lawmakers passed a law that seizes most of the property taxes generated from data centers and sends them to state coffers instead. Now, instead of funding public schools and local services like police and fire response, data center tax revenue will fund tax cuts for the state’s wealthiest households.

West Virginia has a long history of resiliency rooted in strong communities. We can support our neighbors, diversify our economy and rebuild our schools, but we need to use real data, be clear-eyed about the dynamics at the root of our state’s economic history, and invest in our people and our communities over giveaways to outside interests and corporations.