Source: WILSON TIMES, 2/21/19


There are a host of reasons why North Carolina has two distinct economies, one rich and the other in varying stages of poverty. It’s largely an urban-rural divide, with most of our big cities enjoying robust economic growth and workers drawing good salaries while most of our rural areas haven’t seen success since the textile mills failed and tobacco farming began its slow death. But it’s not just a story of our failure to replace those once-robust rural industries with the Next Big Thing. The problem is that we never created a path for the Next Big Thing to follow into our rural communities.

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