The story you see here about football in Nebraska is remarkably similar to the bleak picture Dryden was painting of small-town hockey across Canada in the late 1980s. The biggest factor behind all of this was very simply, and Dryden summed it up so perfectly that I pulled the book off my bookshelf so I can quote him right here:
The fact is that the province's 850 communities reflect Saskatchewan of another time. The size of a farm historically bears some relationship to the capacity of a family and its equipment to cope with it. The existence of a local town bears some relationship to the ability of local people to get access to its services. Technological advances have allowed farmers to handle larger farms with many fewer people and to travel greater distances to gain access to a town's services. As a result, farm families have gotten smaller, and many children who grow up extraneous to the needs of the farm move to the cities. This leaves many fewer people living in the same geographical area. Services that have sprung up to support these people -- car dealerships, banks, barber and beauty shops -- must, to survive, increase the size of the area in which they do business. This, of course, means an overlap with the services offered by other towns that also must extend their reach ... The simple fact of today is that, economically, Saskatchewan does not need all of its 850 communities.
Replace "Saskatchewan" with "Nebraska" and you have the exact same forces at work here in the U.S.
I don't think taxation has anything to do with it. If anything, many of these rural towns get far more in Federal money (directly and indirectly) than their citizens and businesses pay in Federal taxes.
Yep. A huge percentage of small towns would have disappeared completely by now without the huge artificial influx of federal government money.