I subscribe neither to the Occupy Wall Street belief that big private money is running our federal government to the detriment of the rest of us, or the Tea Party belief that government is “too big.”
But… I’ll confess to an impression — and it’s nothing more than that — that when you total it all up, there’s too much money in D.C., period.
It’s just a feeling I used to get, visiting Washington. And I haven’t been there, for work purposes, since the ’90s. So this isn’t just about the buildup of the federal government during the Bush and Obama administrations.
I’d get this feeling standing on the Metro platform waiting for a subway train. People around me just looked way more prosperous, based on their attire, than the people one sees waiting for public transportation elsewhere. More prosperous than in New York, or London, in my limited experience (even around Wall Street; even within The City). And “limited experience” is key; this is as subjective and anecdotal as anything gets.
But I got to thinking about that impression reading this piece by Joel Kotkin at newgeography:
Besides shared concerns over Syria, the NSA and IRS, grass-roots conservatives and liberals increasingly reject the conventional wisdom of their Washington betters. What increasingly matters here is not political “spin,” but the breadth of anti-Washington sentiment. After all, while most of the country continues to suffer low economic growth, the Washington area has benefitted from the expansion of federal power. The entire industry of consultants, think tanks, lawyers and related fields, no matter their supposed ideologies, has waxed while the rest of America has waned.
This has been a golden era for the nation’s capital, perhaps the one place that never really felt the recession. Of the nation’s 10 richest counties, seven are in the Washington area. In 1969, notes liberal journalist Dylan Matthews, wages in the D.C. region were 12 percent higher than the national average; today, they are 36 percent higher. Matthews ascribes this differential not so much to government per se, but on the huge increase in lobbying, which has nearly doubled over the past decade.
Matthews draws a liberal conclusion, not much different than one a conservative would make, that “Washington’s economic gain may be coming at the rest of the country’s expense.” Washington may see itself as the new role model for dense American cities but this reflects the fact that it’s one of the few places where educated young people the past five years have been able to get a job that pays well.
This is intolerable to Americans of differing political persuasions. …
No, I’m not on the verge of becoming populist or anything; I assure you. I’m just saying that I know the feeling.
To take it a bit further…
It’s not just a money thing. The fact that such an enormous proportion of the news and commentary that people in this country comes out of Washington, combined with the way that Beltway-style politics has overwhelmed state and local, turning Tip O’Neill’s dictum on its head (now, all politics is national, not local), is even more troubling. (Actually, those two things are sort of the same phenomenon.)
Increasingly, with the decline of mid-sized dailies like The State to go out and collect local and state news, Americans know less and less about what’s happening in their own communities.
And that is a bad thing. I say that not just as a guy who has known for the last few years that about the only jobs left in my trade are in Washington, while my life is here. It’s just really, objectively, a bad thing.
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I thought this one would engender some comments. I just never know…
Well, I guess I didn’t comment because my comment would be: I agree.
I consider myself a pretty “involved” guy, and I know more about national politics than I do local politics, which goes to your point.
I guess I missed the point of the post. I’ve read it a couple times and admit to not even knowing what to respond to.
Too much power and money in Washington? Yeah. But what can you do about it? The only way to lessen the influence of Washington would be to cut taxes and spending. That ain’t happening. People get rich by being in close proximity to the politicians who make the spending decisions. Politicians get rich off lobbyists by spending other people’s money.
It’s not just taxes and spending.
It’s private entities — from issues-based advocacy groups to industry lobbying organizations — that account for so much of that wealth I would see in the attire of people on the subway platform.
The national attention is so focused on Washington, the stakes of what happens there are so high (or perceived as such), that money flows there from all kinds of sources. Not just taxes.
That is NOT to state the Occupy paranoia that our government is bought and paid for. That’s ridiculously simplistic.
Further, I think a great deal of that money swirls into Washington to very little purpose. So much of it comes not from big corporations, but from individuals targeted by ridiculous emails that play on their personal prejudices and proclivities.
There’s just a whole advocacy industry inside the Beltway that exists to finance itself — and if it has to polarize the country into paralysis in order to do so, well, that’s just the cost of doing business, right?
So you only like those types of advocacy businesses when they are located within the city limits of Columbia? How is Push Digital any different?
The reason those “private entities” locate in DC is partly for access to the halls of power & funding. Advocacy groups, industry trade associations & lobbyists all are there for one reason. Money. Either to keep their hand in the public till, or to keep the public hand out of their own till. Less tax money = less reason for them to be there.
Or it may be about influencing legislation and/or regulations to give a group some type of competitive advantage. But you’re right – every action in and around Washington is about money. Willie Sutton’s line about robbing banks because that’s where the money is applies here.
Yeah, not much to say here as DC grows in stature and wealth, while the rest of the nation devolves into squalor. For a long time Wall Street (NY) was where the wealth and power was concentrated, now it’s DC.
Hunger Games style entertainment can’t be far away…