John, I was thinking the other day about when I got into college. For undergrad, I got into both Wake Forest and Carolina, and I remember sitting on the couch with my dad trying to figure out how to choose between the two.
My dad said, “Well, here’s what’s going to happen: you can go to Wake Forest. But if you go to Wake Forest, you will graduate with about $100,000 in debt, and it’s probably going to take you fifty years to get out from under that. You’ll spend the rest of your life working to pay off that education. Or you can go to Carolina, which is a public university, and your mom and I will actually be able to afford to cover it.”
Because we had such an incredible asset in our public university system, and because I had the luck of being born into a household that had enough to get by, I graduated debt-free. I wasn’t beholden to tens of thousands of dollars of debt for the rest of my life, because our state government made a choice to invest in our people, and to invest in affordable education.
I’m a product of the fact that once upon a time, our state government believed in investing in our people.
After graduating Carolina, I went to pursue my PhD at Clemson because I felt it was important to understand the role that government has played in our economy and how that impacts our communities. Well, I got into school, and I studied hard, and the data I saw all pointed to one thing: that we have left too many people behind over the last forty years. I was lucky enough to catch the tail end of investments made long before I was born, but those investments have dried up, and others haven’t had the same luck.
Because here’s the thing: when you take a macro view of what’s going on in the world, things look fine. Stock market’s great. GDP’s doing great. Unemployment is great. But if you dive down under those numbers, you see that the prosperity hasn’t been spread out evenly. A few parts of our state have done exceptionally well—Charlotte, the Triangle, Asheville, the Triad—but we’re leaving about 80% of our geography behind.
And when people get left behind—when they lack opportunity—they lose hope. And hopelessness is a real danger to our democracy, our economy, and our way of life.
If we think of our economy like a board game, then our government is the entity responsible for making the rules. And, you know, when you play a game, you sit down and play by the rules because you know that the rules are fair. You might win. You might lose. But you sit down and do what you’re supposed to because you know you’ve got a fighting chance.
But for a whole lot of folks, the rules feel like they’re stacked against them. For a whole lot of folks, they do what they’re told—they go to school, they study well, they get a good degree, they try to get that job—and at the end of it, they look back and realize that they and all of their friends never even had a chance.
We’ve been promised since childhood that if you just play by the rules, then you, too, can win the American Dream. You can afford to buy a house. You can afford to raise a family. You won’t spend your whole life struggling just to get out from under a mountain of debt.
So what happens when you and everyone you know has played by the rules, and you still can’t name anybody who actually won the prize?
My generation and younger have some of the lowest rates of homeownership in American history. Our rural communities are riddled with poverty because there are fewer and fewer good jobs to be had every year. And what’s happening in so many of these places is exactly what happens when you realize that you’re playing a rigged game: not only do you stop playing, you flip the damn game board.
That’s why our economy is so fragile. That’s why our democracy is so fragile. Our government on a fundamental level has forgotten the key responsibilities that it has to our people. It’s forgotten that with a little investment, any ordinary kid from Taylorsville or wherever else can get into a good school and go on to have a good life, and that the hope of being able to do that is what keeps our society running. And we have to fix that before it’s too late.
John, can I count on you to help me try to fix it? Can I count on you to pitch in to this campaign so that we can help turn the tide? Will you help me stand up and make sure every voter from Andrews to Ahoskie knows that we’re here to make the rules of the game fair again?
