Hardship by County

The Christian Science Monitor has a story today that reports on the amount of economic hardship being experienced by each across the nation. Here in the Mountain states, there is a wide range of hardship economically. Among the counties having hard times are urban counties like Denver in Colorado, Clark in Nevada, and Maricopa in Arizona, while others are largely rural like Santa Cruz in Arizona, Luna in New Mexico, Big Horn in Wyoming, Daggett in Utah, and Lincoln in Montana. Counties that seemingly have a lower level of economic hardship are in greater numbers in most of Montana, parts of western and northern Nevada, eastern New Mexico, northern Arizona, and many mountain counties in central Colorado. Why a county has little or more economic hardship largely depends on the nature of economic diversity in each county and the amount of federal dollars regularly flowing into each county. It seems the counties with the strongest governmental, military, energy, and agricultural economic strengths are doing the best at this time, and probably will be the pacesetters in the region as well as nationally due to the economic downturn, rising energy and food prices, vast economic inequality, and poor public policy set on addressing poverty and economic injustice.
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http://www.csmonitor.com/patchworknation/csmstaff/2008/0616/where-hardship-is-acute-and-why-that-counts-in-%e2%80%9908/
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