Barbed Wire: Rural poverty in Montana not always acknowledged. Eight Montana counties are at the bottom of the national list for average wages and salaries.

There are things we know intuitively, and, for the most part, we keep that knowledge hidden in a mental closet somewhere behind our right ear.

Like family skeletons, these insights are locked out of sight, out of mind because we know that running them up to the frontal lobe and into the daylight causes discomfort and pain for ourselves and our neighbors.

But once in a while, a reckoning is forced by an outside observer, who by sheer mustering of facts, serves up a large helping of reality – cold reality much like this winter.

Such is the case with a recent article in The Economist datelined Judith Basin County, Montana.

Regional poverty has moved out of the South to the Northern Great Plains, and eight Montana counties are at the bottom of the national list for average wages and salaries. An important element of the analysis is that none of these counties is home to an Indian reservation.

The residents of the eight counties are white and poor, though most would deny the latter.

Meagher County, named for the Civil War general who became Montana’s territorial governor, is at the top of the inverted list of 10. Next comes Petroleum, Carter, Judith Basin, Garfield, a county each in North Dakota and Nebraska, then Golden Valley, Liberty and Wheatland. The average annual personal income in these counties runs from $13,485 to $14,441. The federal government sets the poverty level at $18,400 a year for a family of four. The criterion for the ranking is average wages and salaries as reported on federal tax returns filed for 2003.

Jim Gransbery
BARBED WIRE

Full Story: http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2005/12/25/build/business/35-barbed-wire.inc