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.
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 …
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