Although the United States began to emerge from recession in 1983, poverty was still a major problem in many areas, such as rural West Virginia, where unemployment hovered around 30 percent. Remedial measures, such as President Reagan's 1983 Jobs Bill, did little to alleviate the problem. A major facet of the bill involved funding for public works projects, little of which had any practical applications in such remote, underdeveloped areas of the nation.