Opinion & commentary
Opinion and commentary submitted to Appalachia Insider by individual contributors. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Appalachia Insider. These pieces are separate from our news reporting.
Every year, the Social Security Trustees release a report, and every year the headlines say the same thing: the program is running out of money. This year’s report projects that the retirement trust fund will exhaust its…
Read story →There’s a quiet but consequential shift happening in Kentucky’s energy debate, and this time it isn’t theoretical. It’s legislative, it’s targeted, and it’s aimed squarely at small modular nuclear reactors. This session…
Read story →I was watching a video this evening in which Jamie Dimon talked about inflation staying “sticky” and the possibility that interest rates could keep rising. I kept coming back to the same question. Why? Not why the Feder…
Read story →There is something about the way we talk about money in this country that has bothered me for a long time. We talk about the federal debt like the government is a family sitting around the kitchen table with too many cre…
Read story →I bought a Toyota Grand Highlander that cost around $60,000. I financed it through Toyota. Every month, I make a large payment on a vehicle that I am told I own. Toyota made money selling me the vehicle. Toyota makes mon…
Read story →A few years ago, I started looking at the ridge that runs from the Route 30 side of Magoffin County toward Royalton and Tip Top and wondering why we did not see it differently. There was already a maintained road across…
Read story →By Ariel Fugate, Communications Manager, Mountain Association Four years after the devastating Eastern Kentucky floods of 2022, communities across the region are still rebuilding. While significant progress has been mad…
Read story →I was watching a discussion this morning about the national debt, Treasury bonds, rising yields, and the federal government buying back some of its own debt. The concern was understandable. The United States has crossed …
Read story →There is something revealing in the story of Sony receiving an estimated $508 million back in tariff refunds. Not because Sony did anything particularly unusual, and not because the refund itself is the only thing that m…
Read story →ABC News ran a headline this week blaming rising prices at Dollar Tree on President Trump’s tariffs. It is a neat little story if you do not look too closely. Tariffs go up, prices go up, and the network gets to point a …
Read story →They tell us Walmart has “always low prices.” Most people accept that without thinking much about it. Cheaper than the store down the road must mean cheaper. That’s how competition is supposed to work. Push prices down.…
Read story →The Steward’s Works Program Eastern Kentucky does not suffer from a lack of problems that need solved. You can see them almost everywhere you drive. A culvert clogged for years. A drainage ditch overtaken by brush. A …
Read story →There is a scene in The Sandlot that I’ve always loved. The boys are playing baseball as fireworks explode overhead on the Fourth of July. The whole town seems to be outside. People are gathered on porches, kids are runn…
Read story →If you spend enough time in Eastern Kentucky, you start noticing something in people’s voices when they talk about institutions now. Not outrage so much as exhaustion. The kind that settles into a place after people spen…
Read story →If you want to understand the failure of modern economics, spend some time in Eastern Kentucky. Drive through towns with leaking water systems and roads still scarred from floods. Pass abandoned industrial sites and nei…
Read story →It seems that every time you turn on the news in the last ten years you see the same thing. Another town without clean water. Another boil advisory taped to the refrigerator. Another family standing in a checkout line wi…
Read story →In Eastern Kentucky, we don’t really have a land problem. And we don’t really have a labor problem. What we have is a water problem, a sewer problem, a housing problem, and an infrastructure problem. You can still buil…
Read story →There are still places in this country where the land tells the truth. You can stand at the edge of a small farm just after sunrise and see it plainly. Rows that don’t stretch for miles, but bend with the shape of the g…
Read story →People have spent my whole life calling Eastern Kentucky a poor place. They say it on the news. They say it in Frankfort. They say it every time we show up in a ranking nobody wants to be on. But I have never believed th…
Read story →For more than a hundred years, Eastern Kentucky carried America on its back. Our coal lit its homes, powered its factories, and built its wealth. We gave everything. The hills, the rivers, our health, and our people were…
Read story →I looked over my electric bill the other day, and something didn’t sit right. Every light fixture in this house has been replaced. Not just the bulbs, the entire fixtures. New switches. New outlets. Every appliance I ow…
Read story →In Magoffin County, when something serious happens, there’s a moment that settles in before help arrives. It’s quiet, but it’s heavy. You’re watching someone struggle to breathe. Or you’re holding pressure on a wound. …
Read story →For years, Eastern Kentucky has been told it is poor, broken, and beyond saving without outside rescue. We have watched the same cycle repeat. New officials, old habits. Grants missed. Roads patched instead of fixed. Wat…
Read story →Most people think government happens somewhere far above them, in rooms they will never enter. But a county rises or falls in the quiet and ordinary systems that shape daily life. The road that survives the winter. The w…
Read story →In Eastern Kentucky, we don’t really have a land problem. And we don’t really have a labor problem. What we have is a water problem, a sewer problem, a housing problem, and an infrastructure problem. You can still buil…
Read story →More than 3,800 people in Magoffin County rely on SNAP benefits every month. That’s nearly a third of our entire population. But here’s the part no one’s talking about: That’s not just a statistic. It’s an opportunity. …
Read story →For nearly a century, farm bills have funneled billions of dollars into keeping America’s fields producing. But the story of that support is not one of fairness. It has been tilted toward the largest landholders, the mos…
Read story →“What “Full Faith and Credit” Really Means” There is a question I have been turning over in my mind for a while now, and it sits quietly underneath a lot of the news we see but rarely gets said out loud. People ask what…
Read story →“The Steward’s Works Program” Eastern Kentucky does not suffer from a lack of problems that need solved. You can see them almost everywhere you drive. A culvert clogged for years. A drainage ditch overtaken by brush. …
Read story →When people talk about housing today, the conversation usually begins in the wrong place. We argue about prices. We argue about interest rates. We argue about whether young families simply need to work harder or whether…
Read story →Every day, a postal truck turns down a gravel road somewhere in America. Sometimes it is a paved street in a city neighborhood. Sometimes it is a winding road through farmland. And sometimes it is a narrow stretch of dir…
Read story →I have sat in enough county meetings to recognize the sound. It isn’t yelling at first. It’s the shuffle of papers. The low murmur before someone stands up. A man clears his throat. A woman grips a folded copy of someth…
Read story →There’s a quiet but consequential shift happening in Kentucky’s energy debate, and this time it isn’t theoretical. It’s legislative, it’s targeted, and it’s aimed squarely at small modular nuclear reactors. This session…
Read story →It takes a special kind of nerve for a government-backed monopoly to look at an ice-covered state and tell families to “conserve” heat. While roads freeze, pipes burst, and homes struggle to stay warm, the institutions …
Read story →“Salyersville’s Health Can’t Wait: A Path From Crisis to Recovery Salyersville and Magoffin County are not beyond repair, but public health cannot wait. In a small community, failing utilities are not an abstract polic…
Read story →“Kentucky Power Company Customers Can’t Get a Break on Rate Increases Kentucky Power Company customers can’t seem to get a break. With base rate increases about every two years, and smaller hits in between, residential …
Read story →Both this administration and the one before tried the same tactic. They tried to explain the economy into feeling better. They held press conferences and posted charts, insisting that Americans simply did not understand …
Read story →I saw a post the other day about France taxing wealth that sits still. People were shouting about it online the way they always do. One side calling it theft. The other calling it fairness. But no one was talking about t…
Read story →When the state broke ground on the Chestnut Ridge community in Knott County, most people saw it as another government project. Seventy-four rental homes, fourteen million dollars, a new beginning for families who had los…
Read story →There is a new kind of fear taking shape in America. It is quiet, unspoken, and hard to name. It is not the fear of losing a job, or even of falling behind. It is the fear of no longer mattering, of being economically un…
Read story →America once knew how to build. Not just factories, but communities. Not just wealth, but the kind of citizens who could sustain it. The measure of a town was what it could make, fix, and grow. The measure of a person wa…
Read story →In a fiat currency system like the United States, the federal government is the sole legal issuer of dollars. It does not earn them. It does not borrow them in order to spend. It creates them through spending itself. Whe…
Read story →Every Thursday night at 7, the US 23 Country Music Highway Museum in Paintsville turns into something rare. Kids and grandparents, teenagers and old pickers, all in the same room, trading songs and stories without even r…
Read story →*The Weight of Small Things I’m watching Dead Poets Society for the first time. I have just reached the scene where the boys slip away into the night, crawling through roots and stone until they reach the cave. Candles …
Read story →Bill Clinton liked to talk about balance sheets, about prosperity, about the “New Economy.” He sold himself as the man who brought discipline to Washington, a president who turned deficits into surpluses and left America…
Read story →They say Ronald Reagan saved America. The GOP calls him the greatest Republican president of modern times, the man who cut taxes, unleashed the economy, and proved that free markets and small government were the path to …
Read story →**Josh Hawley’s Accidental Blueprint for Fixing What Globalism Broke. For decades you’ve been told the same story. “Tariffs are a tax on the consumer.” “Tariffs make everything more expensive.” “Tariffs hurt the little…
Read story →**The Pixie Dust Economy This started after I saw someone hit their breaking point. Not in rage. Not in laziness. In exhaustion. They had done the right things. Showed up. Worked hard. Tried to build something honest. A…
Read story →**Tariffs Are a Wall. And That’s Why the Giants Hate Them You’ve heard the excuses. “Tariffs hurt consumers.” “Tariffs start trade wars.” “Tariffs are taxes on the American people.” But what they really fear is this. …
Read story →Authors Bio: Zack Hall for Kentucky is a former teacher and candidate for Kentucky’s State House District 84. The future of the Democratic Party looks Appalachian. For months now, people have been putting the party’s p…
Read story →** Why You’ll Never Get Hired If You Ask the Right Questions We keep calling it a broken system. But at some point, we have to stop pretending it was ever built to work in your favor. Before you even get to speak to a …
Read story →**If We Can Print Money for War, Why Not for Doctors? **What a conversation about nursing scholarships revealed about our broken priorities This started during a conversation with someone I’ve known for years. Sharp gu…
Read story →**Do Blue States Really Subsidize Red States? And Do Taxes Actually Pay for Government Spending? There’s an image that floats around from time to time. A cartoon showing someone in a red-state pickup truck, shouting abo…
Read story →**Walmart’s New Price Trick Should Terrify You Why Surge Pricing Isn’t Innovation. It’s Exploitation. I saw a headline today that didn’t just make me shake my head. It clarified something I’ve felt for a long time. Wal…
Read story →**Choosing Homelessness for a Dog Isn’t Noble. It’s a Warning Sign. I came across a news article the other night that stopped me cold. It was being shared widely on social media as something heartwarming. A sweet story…
Read story →**Where We Still Remember There’s a kind of holiness that doesn’t need stained glass or marble altars. Sometimes it shows up on a hillside, tucked behind a gravel road, where folding chairs circle the ones we’ve loved—a…
Read story →The following submission does not necessarily represent the views of Appalachia Insider as an organization. Chris Woolery is the Energy Projects Coordinator at Mountain Association. Over his career, Chris has helped del…
Read story →**The Lie of Social Security Insolvency: Why They Say It’s Broke—And Why That’s a Choice, Not a Fact They’ve been telling us for years that Social Security is going broke. Not “under strain.” Not “in need of reform.” B…
Read story →**Holding On While Moving Forward** We’ve been through a lot here. More than we probably give ourselves credit for. The coal left. The factories closed. Businesses we’d counted on for generations shut their doors, and …
Read story →Nuclear in the Mountains 2—A Safer Future for Magoffin County I recently posted an OpEd about bringing nuclear energy opportunities to Magoffin County, and I’ve read through all the feedback. I appreciate everyone who t…
Read story →**Violence, Protest, and the Illusion of the In-Between A friend and I were discussing the nature of protest and where the line is drawn between civil disobedience and outright violence. The conversation started with a …
Read story →Weathering the Storm: Eastern Kentucky’s Strength Amid Disaster The rain started as it always does in the hills—steady, soaking, unremarkable. The kind that settles into the valleys and drips from the porches, the kind …
Read story →The Weight of the Mirror: Why Leaders Fear Admitting Mistakes This all started with a simple thought: why is it so hard for leaders to admit they’ve messed up? The question popped into my head after reflecting on a situ…
Read story →The Debt Lie: Why America Can’t Go Broke (And Why They Keep Telling You It Can) It’s no wonder the average American has no idea how the monetary system works. We’ve been hearing the same story for decades: the U.S. is i…
Read story →**The Legacy of the Boomers: A Tale of Entitlement and Betrayal** The Baby Boomer generation, born into an era of unprecedented prosperity, often touts itself as the epitome of self-reliance. They speak of pulling thems…
Read story →**The False Promise of Lower Prices** For over half a century, Americans have been sold a promise that low prices would make life easier. At first glance, it seems logical—why not pay less for the same goods? But hidden…
Read story →**Our Desire to Humanize Villains and the Cost of Losing Heroes There was a time when stories had clear lines. Heroes, flawed though they were, stood for something bigger than themselves. They taught us about sacrifice,…
Read story →
