TheAgitator.com
Washington’s Wealth Boom
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009America’s three richest counties are now in the Washington suburbs, as are nine of the richest 20. In my Fox column this week, I explain why it’s problematic when the wealthiest (and only growing wealthier) region of the country is one where the only major industry is government.
Great points. Very troubling indeed.
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Don’t worry. When Obama and the Democrats get ahold of the budget, a lot of federal contractors in those counties will lose their jobs the way they did under Clinton.
Excellent points, Radley, but you might want to append a “DC” to “Washington” so as not to unfairly blemish the reputations of our friends in Washington state :-)
Good article, too bad your editor set a bad tone with the comment that the Western county’s results are skewed by thier size–as median income isn’t affected by the size of the county.
Interesting to note how many of those other wealthy counties are amassed around various state capitols as well.
@#4 I understand what you are saying regarding statistics. I think the point is relevant though if one just takes a cursory glance at the map. A quick look and someone might say, there are more “richers” over in California than on the east coast. However, it only “appears” that way due to the geographic size of the counties. In reality, the devil is in the details.
Terry (er, Dad) — My point was just that because counties are larger in the West, when you’re looking at a map highlighting the 100 largest counties, it at first glance can be misleading. The D.C. area, for example, has 14 counties on the list, but the red area looks smaller than, for example, California’s Silicon Valley and the wealthy parts of Southern Florida, but only because counties are geographically bigger in those areas.
“…boom is the result of the massive expansion in government over the last 10 years, which has populated the region with an increase in well-paid federal employees,…”
I know a few well paid feds, but most of us traded higher wage potential in the private sector for the stability of federal jobs. I could have made probably 10-15K more as a contractor, but I’d probably be out of a job right now with the down turn, if my office is any indication. From a libertarian standpoint that might be a perverse incentive, but from an individual standpoint I’ll take stability over higher wages the majority of the time.
Wow, you mean political power and financial power actually attract each other. Amazing. What an insight!!!
Radley,
If you want to cut back on the federal contractors and the money spent on them, a few things will need to be done:
1) Federal employment for civilians will need to be at-will so government managers can fire employees for the same behavior that their private sector counterparts can fire them.
2) Hire more background investigators so that DoD and DoJ can process more security clearances, more quickly. This will make it easier for people to get into the currently high-paying positions, which will lower the wages of the contract labor force.
3) Increase accountability on the government side. Just look at the FBI’s major failures like Virtual Case File. Currently, there is little potential for punishment for federal employees who mismanage their end of the contract, even in cases where the federal contractor is actually giving them dire warnings that the government’s direction amount to suicide for the project.
Montgomery County, MD has a pretty nice biotech area centered in Rockville.
But, yeah, in general, this whole region produces nothing but red tape. And takes an increasingly larger cut of the take as it does so.
In Fairfax County we are looking at a budget shortfall of roughly $650 million on a total budget of about $3.3 billion. Over the last several years our commercial tax base has shrunk from 27 to 17 percent. Moreover, according the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, in the last six years county spending has increased by $1 billion more than the increase in inflation and population growth would suggest.
It would seem that the mindset of those in D.C. has trickled down into those of Fairfax.
Agreed it’s scary. But there are other industries that have popped up. Biotech, and “high-tech” being two examples MoCo and Dulles Greenway. Also there are a number of private Media outlets that have HQ’s in DC. XM, BET, Discovery Channel(MoCo) ect. Although its worth noting that some of these industries in Greater Washington sprung up due to large government research facilities and infrastructure.
Don’t take this the wrong way but anecdotally I’ve noticed that people who aren’t in the true private sector and are transplants to the DC area assume that everyone is tied to the government somehow in greater DC. Its not true. The Greater Washington economy is much more diverse then one would think.
Another industry inside the district limit would be education. GW, Georgetown, Howard aren’t just universities either. They all run massive hospitals and research facilities. For a bonus tack on American, CUA, and Gallaudet, all in the district limits.
But Point taken, its not without merit. But there are many of us here who have NOTHING to do with the government, even on a once or twice removed level. The statement “the only major industry is government” isn’t really any more true then saying the only industry Chicago has is meat packing.
I live in Rockville. I like biotech. However, if you look at what’s going on with MoCo biotech, a lot of the R&D is moving away, manufacturing’s headed up to Fredneck, and many of the remaining companies are into things like testing/contracting for FDA. Examples: Celera’s a ghost-town, HGSI, itself largely a government-created entity, lost all its good drugs to the CEO’s new venture, etc….
There’s still some here, but not what it was, and nothing on CA/MA/Research Triangle…
Though in their defense, Howard and Frederick Counties have a lot of (legitimate) high-tech industry that produces stuff, and
I wouldn’t be surprised if the new Baltimore biotech centers start running rings around MoCo soon.
how the wealth stacks up isn’t easily visible from the middle- thanks for pointing this out. it’s such an obvious thing after you look at the map…
The dispensing of government favors is a growth industry. Expect growth to climb at even a faster rate in the near future as Congress and the President busily offer up the anticipated wealth of those who haven’t been born yet under the newly fashionable heading of emergency bailouts (at least until the patina of credibility wears off revealing that it, too, while more innovative and bold than most, is really just another cleverly perpetrated gang rape of the taxpayer by the very people those taxpayers keep re-electing for that very purpose).
I sometimes wonder what incentive future generations are going to have to be productive knowing that the proceeds of that productivity were already consumed before they were born. It’s like showing up at the bar after the party has ended, just to be stuck with the tab for all the shit-faced drunks who left just as you arrived.
Okie, you state a bunch of statistics that make the government seem large and point out that government employees are well paid. The first is obvious, the second seems like a good idea unless you want idiots running the government.
But, you never actually make any real evidence based case for why this is a bad thing for the country. You just state as fact the conservative mindset. What evidence do you have that wealthy people living near DC is bad? What sequence of events can you envision that hurts Americans as a whole as a result of this fact? You don’t lay any of that out.
In short, what’s your reasoning?
[...] Radley Balko has a new column at Fox on “Washington’s Wealth Boom.” The new top three [wealthiest counties in America according to per capita income] are now Loudon County, Virginia; Fairfax County, Virginia; and Howard County, Maryland. All three are suburbs or exurbs of Washington, D.C. In 2000, 14 of the 100 richest counties were in the Washington, D.C., area. In 2007, it was nine of the richest 20. [...]
I understand the larger point you’re making here: the government is big and getting bigger. However, the stats and figures you cite don’t really support this argument very well, particularly the data on the wealthiest counties. Furthermore, the conclusion that the DC region is wealthy solely as a consequence of rampant federal spending is way off base.
First, as the article points out, western counties are bigger geographically than their eastern counterparts. I’d expect to see a larger variance in average wealth among a set of small sized counties than large ones. The smaller a county, the less likely that it will be diverse economically, the more likely that it will be an outlier. DC is disproportionately represented, so is New York. So what?
Second, the DC metro area, IIRC, is the third largest metropolitan area in the country. Given that wealthy counties in general are centered around urban areas, one should expect to see a large number of wealthy counties around DC.
Finally, the claim that “Washington Metro area doesn’t actually produce anything”, is ludicrous and provably false. You exempt the tech corridor, but there are tons of other organizations in the area that produce plenty: Sprint, Gannet, Washington Post, Cap One, Conventry Health Care, Harman Manufacturing, Marriott, the Carlyle Group; we could go on all day here, without even getting into the large employers that are direct beneficiaries of the federal government, like Lockheed and General Dynamics.
To be certain, DC benefits economically from being the seat of the federal government. Most capital cities do. However, this condition alone is not an indicator that DC metro residents are lapping up taxpayer dollars and producing nothing of value in return. Radley, do you believe that your work at the Cato institute (located at 1000 Mass Ave, DC) amounts to nothing more than paying “lawyers to procure money the government has forcibly taken from taxpayers”? I don’t.
I think it’s valid and important to criticize the federal government for waste, inefficiency, and growth. But to say that the 5 million souls who inhabit the DC region are guilty of the same? Well, it’s just BS. Try telling that to a software engineer at AOL or a marketing analyst at Marriott. Usually, your Fox articles are an oasis of intellectual honesty, but this one sounds like an editor asked you to fan the flames of the culture wars, and you happily obliged. (Those city folks! They’re taking our money!)
Also, you may want to ask Fox to fix this:
Radley Balko is a senior editor for Reason magazine and publishes a weblog at TheAgigator.com.
It’s not bad, per se. Many government contractors in the DC area are engineers or high level IT employees like sysadmins and DBAs. These people are actually cheaper to hire on a need-by-need basis because the federal government will never have to pay them any benefits or pension. Additionally, you wouldn’t want most engineers to ever be federal employees because they would entertain themselves with finding new, cool ideas to work on, and you would have budgetary chaos from that.
What actually hurts the public is that the federal government’s labor management policies are based on either outdated or unrealistic assumptions. One of those is the notion of protecting civil servants from politics. You can’t do that. I can guarantee you that if a CIA analyst had stuck to their guns and refused to tell Cheney what he wanted to hear, they would have been fired one way or another (given such shitty work that they’d leave for Starbucks and McDonalds). Go to an at-will system like corporate America, so the dead wood can be kicked out, and there is less of an assumption that the federal government is where people go when they’re too lazy to work an honest job, but too proud to just take a welfare check.
What the hell does that have to do with the fact that the counties surrounding DC are wealthier than average? And again, you’re just stating a bunch of conservative assumptions. Where is your evidence that this is the case?