A Rural New Deal is urgently needed to help revitalize small towns and rural communities. That should be good news enough. But the added good news is that the policies and actions contained in the Rural New Deal will help working people in cities and suburbs as well. We’ll explore the particulars in a moment, but first some important background.

For most of the past five decades, small towns and rural communities have witnessed a steady erosion of their economies, along with a sharp increase in health problems, addiction, housing shortages, and the loss of population, including many young people looking for opportunities elsewhere. This didn’t just happen. It’s been a bipartisan, four-decade long betrayal of working folks, enabled by investor-driven trade deals like NAFTA, trickle-down tax and economic policies, and the near-abandonment of antitrust enforcement. Taken together, these policies—along with disinvestment in rural communities and one-time factory towns—have concentrated wealth and pulled the rug out from under workers, farmers, community banks, and small businesses. Recent trends, like the buying up of housing stock, land, and local physicians’ practices by private equity giants, is only accelerating the extraction and transfer of wealth from those who actually produce it to those who make money from trading, downsizing, or even eliminating the businesses.

The need for investment in infrastructure as well as local leadership and capacity is particularly critical to create good jobs and strong businesses in rural and working-class communities. While some characterize rural communities and red states as the primary beneficiaries of federal dollars, this is only partly true and overlooks key investment gaps in these places. Rural communities tend to receive more net federal dollars for two reasons: In general, they have more low-income people and more older people than cities and suburbs. As a result, higher per capita levels of federal money, in the form of Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicare, and Social Security flow to these regions. More disability funds, whether Black Lung or Social Security Disability payments, are also transferred to people in these communities, but that’s in large part because the jobs available skew toward the physically demanding and, too often, the dangerous and debilitating.

Where former factory towns and rural communities lack substantial and sustained investment is in the things that help them build long-term prosperity and higher levels of self-sufficiency: value-adding infrastructure (for example for food, fisheries, forest, and fiber enterprises), broadband, workforce development that meets emerging demands, and individual and organizational capacity to secure investment and drive bottom up, locally based solutions to their needs and problems. Studies from the Kellogg Foundation, USDA, and others document the dramatically lower levels of per capita investment of this sort in rural America as compared with urban investments.

Whether implemented in part or in whole, the Rural New Deal (RND) would help reduce the power of Wall Street and the biggest corporations and level the playing field for rural and working-class people. Co-written by the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (RUBI, of which this author is the Executive Director) and Progressive Democrats of America, the policies recommended in the RND are at once practical yet potentially transformational for working people regardless of where they live.

The Rural New Deal is unique among policy platforms in that it was written by rural people, particularly those with hands-on experience in rural development and revitalization. Because of this, the majority of its recommendations have been “field tested” in a range of settings across rural and small-town America. We know they work. We’ve seen how they support bottom-up, locally driven solutions to a wide range of problems these communities face. Examples of successful bottom-up development abound, from the extraordinary levels of business development, job creation, and workforce training that Coalfield Development has spurred in rural West Virginia to the rural revitalization and Latino entrepreneurship catalyzed so effectively by Local First Arizona.

The RND is built around ten pillars, goals with a set of specific recommendations to achieve them. Some of the pillars are very rural-focused, like the first, “Rebuild Farm, Forest, and Food Economies,” while others would benefit working people in cities as well, including the second, “Reward Work & Ensure Livable Wages,” and the third, “Dismantle Monopolies, Empower & Support Local Businesses.”

Broadly speaking, the RND proposes two types of actions: Those requiring investment and those that “change the rules” in order to give workers, small farmers and local businesses a level playing field. Take the third pillar. Policy recommendations that change the rules but require little to no investment of public dollars include:

• Strengthen antitrust laws and dramatically increase enforcement to reverse current extreme levels of corporate concentration
• Eliminate the “carried interest tax loophole” and put caps on fees as initial steps toward reining in private equity’s unbridled power
• Reduce or restrict state and federal subsides provided to massive corporations as incentives to locate or relocate to specific states or regions, using the savings to offer grants and loans to small businesses
• Requiring state and/or federal agencies to set local procurement targets, whether for food, materials, or services, to help expand markets for small and independent businesses.

Pillar three’s recommendations requiring investment of public dollars include:

• Reduce “economic leakage,” that is, dollars leaving local communities, by incentivizing and facilitating “business to business” networks that enable local firms to readily purchase more of the supplies and materials they need from other local businesses
• Invest in robust and effective “land link” programs that match retiring farmers with younger and aspiring farmers looking for land, in order to preserve working farmland while making it more affordable for the next generation of farmers
• Support cooperatives and worker-owned business through access to needed capital (for instance, when a private owner of a company wants to sell the firm to his or her employees) along with the training and technical assistance needed to acquire and manage cooperative enterprises.

In addition to its economic benefits, the RND would also have substantial political benefits to the administration and elected officials who champion it. At present, millions of working folks feel unseen and largely abandoned by both political parties, though the frustration is generally much higher with Democrats. That frustration and the resentment that has arisen from it are driving the extreme political polarization of our times, fueling widespread and deep levels of mistrust. While media and social media play a major role in this, the truth is that many of the grievances working and rural folks have are rational and legitimate. Overcoming the mistrust will take much more than a policy platform like the RND. Nevertheless, it would be a major step forward in demonstrating a serious commitment to building an economy and a politics that, at last, works for working people.