If it weren't for the electoral college, I would say let them fall. A jobs program that allows rural dead-enders the skillset and experience to become urban upstarts is 100% A-OK in my book. Changing demographics and changing environments mean that a town built on molybdenum mining should be allowed to fail once the molybdenum is all gone. This, I think, is what pisses me off the most about everything east of the Mississippi: over here on the wrong coast, it's assumed that a town that can't pay for itself will sink into the sand. Ghost towns are just a thing. Places that have been skeletonized by the passage of time are assumed gone and nobody gives a fuck. Shit, I was lost in the fucking woods 5 miles from pavement (or so I thought) and I stumbled across a fully-paved logging road put in in '67 (I discovered later). And there wasn't a piece of it more than 50 yards long without a tree growing through it. But over there in the real America? Ohhhhh fuck if Thumper's Holler is allowed to fall it'll be the goddamn death of tradition or some shit.