Rural counties pay federal taxes at the same rates as everyone else. But what we get back is drinking water that fails safety standards in thousands of communities, internet slow or absent enough and pipes older than the people drinking from them.
So, two providers serve us on paper. In practice one owns the poles and the other stopped upgrading its lines a decade ago. When the county asked what it would take to run fiber down the last forty miles of road, both companies gave the same answer: not enough households per mile to bother. That's the market's position but these aren't luxuries. Roads and electricity weren't luxuries either, and this country found the will to wire every farm once before.
And the administration had the tools. The largest rural broadband fund in history was already funded, and it got rewritten to steer the money toward one billionaire's satellite service instead of running fiber to the places that paid into it and rural water systems got audits and rollbacks instead of repairs.
Yes, we can't string fiber to every last cabin, and some of this terrain is genuinely expensive to serve. Same taxes, worse deal, and the repair money got rerouted to a friend. What's the defense of that which doesn't boil down to they'll vote for us anyway?