Rust belt?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Rust belt?

I’m not sure whether this is where the phrase “rust belt” originates, but the rusty conveyor belt image cannot be mistaken. It’s real. At any rate, the rusty conveyor belt image will surely help you remember this phrase.

All right, no more ado. Let’s read more stories online to get a better feel of the proverbial “rust belt”:

1. RUST BELT refers to an economic region of the United States concentrated in the formerly dominant industrial states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. By the 1980s, the Rust Belt became what the Dust Bowl had been to an earlier generation—a symbolic name for a devastating economic change. The 1984 Democratic presidential candidate, Walter Mondale, is generally credited with coining the term. During the campaign, Mondale, the former vice president from Minnesota, attacked the economic policies of incumbent Republican president, Ronald Regan, stating that the president was “turning our great industrial Midwest and the industrial base of this country into a rust bowl.” The media, however, repeated and reported the notion as “Rust Belt,” and the phrase stuck as a good description of the declining industrial heartland, especially the steel-and automobile-producing regions in the Northeast and Midwest. The phrase became synonymous with industrial decline in the once-dominant U.S. heavy manufacturing and steel industries.

The Rust Belt has indefinite boundaries, although in 1979 Joel Garreau dubbed the same general region the “Foundry.” Both terms aptly characterized the region’s economic history and underpinnings. Readily available coal, labor, and inland waterways made the region ideal for steel manufacturing. Moreover, the automotive industry—a major buyer of steel—developed nearby. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, the U.S. steel industry rapidly fell from world dominance. The U.S. worldwide market share of manufactured steel went from 20 percent in 1970 to 12 percent by 1990, and American employment in the industry dropped from 400,000 to 140,000 over the same period. Starting in the late 1970s, steel factories began closing. Among the hardest hit of the communities was Youngstown, Ohio, where the closure of three steel mills starting in 1977 eliminated nearly 10,000 high-paying jobs. Also hurt were foundries in Buffalo, New York; and Johnstown and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the last outmoded steel plant closed in the late 1980s.