When did the coal miner become the epitome of the American worker?

Has anyone wondered why the livelihoods of coal workers, as opposed to say the thousands of other professions in the country, have become such a major talking point in American politics lately?

Mick Mulvaney, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director, recently said President Donald Trump’s administration couldn’t ask a coal miner to pay for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).

“When you start looking at places that we reduce spending, one of the questions we asked was can we really continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit pay for these programs? The answer was no,” Mulvaney said while discussing Trump’s “America first” budget on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “We can ask them to pay for defense, and we will, but we can’t ask them to continue to pay for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”

To put this statement in perspective, the CPB received $445 million in federal appropriations in 2016, according to the non-profit organization’s website. The Department of Defense (DoD) on the other hand, received just over $582 billion in discretionary spending last year, according to their government website.

The same budget mentioned above also looks to demolish parts of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The regulator’s funds would be cut by nearly a third. Trump’s budget offers $5.7 billion to the EPA in 2018, equaling a $2.6 billion cut.

“You can’t drain the swamp and leave all the people in it. So, I guess the first place that comes to mind will be the Environmental Protection Agency,” Mulvaney once said during a press conference. “The president wants a smaller EPA. He thinks they overreach, and the budget reflects that.”

Tomi Lahren, a former host for TheBlaze, defended the EPA cuts on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher because she feels the tree hugging regulators kill coal-mining jobs.

In addition to the EPA cuts, congress also overturned a rule designed to prevent coal-mining companies from dumping debris into streams. When asked who benefits from this “special interest stuff,” Lahren said: the forgotten American.

The abortion flip-flopper added, “The coal industry has been attacked. Obama went to war against the coal industry and they saw massive declines.”

Lahren is right about the massive declines. According to data published last year by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the U.S. lost approximately 191,000 jobs in the coal mining industry between September 2014 and May 2016.

While rolling back the Obama-era regulations, Trump surrounded himself with a group of coal workers in the Oval Office. The president then graciously bestowed the men standing behind him with the pen he used to sign the legislation. Yes, he gave one pen to multiple people. Too bad Trump didn’t give the workers something they really need—like healthcare.

Appalachian health officials recently reported a rise in cases of black lung, a deadly coal-mining disease thought to have been curbed by a landmark federal law passed in 1969. According to an investigative report by NPR, young minors are more vulnerable because the thinner coal seams currently being worked in Appalachia leave them susceptible to a strain of the disease rooted in silica dust.

During the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton got a lot of heat for saying “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” Now, it’s easy to say the out of touch liberal’s remarks were insensitive. But, it’s still a good thing for the disgruntled coal miner that her opponent’s alternative to Obamacare didn’t even make it to a vote because their plan would’ve left many coal miners—and other rural Trump voters in general—without health care.

But, once again, why is the coal minor considered to be the epitome of the American worker?

There are approximately 93,000 blue-collar, full-time, permanent jobs related to the coal industry in the U.S., a country of nearly 320 million citizens. This means that significantly less than one percent of our population works in the coal industry.

Now, it’s important to remember that the majority of Americans work in the service sector—102.6 million people (71% of all nonfarm payroll employees) as of July 2016 according to the BLS.

“Among the major industrial sectors, the biggest was education and health services (22.7 million workers), followed by professional and business services (20.3 million) and retail trade (just under 16 million). Manufacturing employed 12.3 million Americans; about 22.2 million were government workers (nearly two-thirds of them at the local level),” the PewResearchCenter reports.

There are also almost twice as many solar workers as coal miners in the U.S. Even though solar accounts for just a fraction of America’s electricity—about 1.3 percent—the industry now employs 260,000 people, according to a survey from the nonprofit Solar Foundation.

However, the solar industry is still overshadowed by the American Petroleum Industry, which employs 9.8 million people.

But, still, why is the coal miner treated like this exotic animal on the endangered species list? Unfortunately for many people, the marketplace is phasing out many jobs. In the years past, there was no political talking point aimed at saving the telephone operator’s job. As online publications (which you’re reading right now) rival print publications, we don’t see politicians vowing to preserve local newspapers and counterculture magazines.

Perhaps this obsession with coal miners has to do with the nostalgia that’s resonated among those negatively affected by neoliberalism and the global economy. The coal miner isn’t hurting anybody. They aren’t part of the assignment or barter-based economy that millennials are all too familiar with. And they aren’t contributing to the degeneration of traditional culture like those liberal elites on the coasts.

But their industry, which does contribute to climate change and cancer among their own workers, is dying. So, maybe it’s time for another profession to take the role as America’s quintessential worker.