(President Warren G. Harding. A conservative politician from Ohio, Harding had few enemies because he rarely took a firm enough stand on an issue to make any.)
“There isn’t anything the matter with world civilization, except that humanity is viewing it through a vision impaired in a cataclysmal war. Poise has been disturbed, and nerves have been racked, and fever has rendered men irrational; sometimes there have been draughts upon the dangerous cup of barbarity, and men have wandered far from safe paths, but the human procession still marches in the right direction.”
– Candidate Warren Gamaliel Harding, 1920.
As we lurch toward the Holidays here in DC, the pressure is on to make everyone play “Let’s Make a Deal.” The House has been told to expect to come back to the District the week after Christmas for more negotiations. I may have to indulge in a few dangerous cups of barbarity to get through it. I am confident I can wander back to the safe path, if I don’t fall down the brick steps of the Willow Restaurant.
It will be a pain to have the Honorable Members and their swarming staffs back. The traffic is bad enough when the Hill is in recess. When they are in session, forget about it. I am going to stay out of the city, if I can, since I am getting a better understanding of the problem with the budget cliff or the collective suicide pact into which we seem to have entered.
But here is the problem: we don’t think there is a real problem, just a theoretical one. You know, a policy issue rather than something real. The numbers that account for who we are, or at least what we make, tend to bear that out.
Sorry if you don’t live here. You might want to drop a line to your re-districted Congressperson and point that out. Here it is in a nutshell: this is a list of the richest counties in the United States. By extrapolation, this represents the wealthiest concentration of non-state-level jurisdictions in the history of this tired old world.
I feel good about it, and a little sorry for the Counties that are further away from the Washington Monument and don’t get to play.
You will note in the list of top ten median-income counties in the US, NoVa comes in at exactly half the top six. Three Maryland in-close counties round the list out. So, six of the top ten counties in the land are right here, encircling the Capital.
Nothing says it better. We are your problem. We are the ones slurping at the public trough, with all that Federal money sloshing around. But it is still surreal. The top earning County- once-rural Loudoun- has a median income of a little under $120K a year- or, to put it in perspective, the equivalent of a couple of public school teachers living together in hetero/same-sex/pals-with-benefits arrangements.
At the moment, I am comfortably north of the median all by myself, though I have to view that as a purely temporary phenomenon. It is a little embarrassing, when they start throwing around the not-paying-our-fair share thing, but I am hardly anything special around here- two bedroom apartment living for me. That makes me wonder at the real disparity in income that is represented by the numbers.
There are some people around here that are channeling some serious money away from you and into their pockets.
Looking at the Geography is useful. Blue Arlington is the little odd-shaped lump with a right angle boundary that completes the original diamond of the District of Columbia is the closest in, naturally, since it actually used to be part of DC. Fat Fairfax was the first to benefit from the flight of the white population from the District after the Riots, and the African-American middle class followed in short order to PG County.
Culpeper County, of the real other Minutemen fame, would never make the list. Fauquier County, just to the south of Prince William, may make it some day, if the sprawl continues to spread with the desire of ordinary people to have a decent quality of life. If you consider the four hours a day you have to spend to get to the land of Oz further north to be of any quality at all.
Culpeper, of course, is nestled on the south side of the Rappahannock River, as several Federal Generals discovered in their increasing fury to drive to Richmond.
Anyway, I think the whole going-over-the-cliff thing has an air of unreality to all of us here, despite the dire warnings and predictions. There are more of those flying around this morning- the Federal Aviation Administration announced 2,200 layoffs, though I do not imagine that the bulk of those jobs are going to come out of the National Capital Region. They will be spread across fly-over country, the way things normally work as Rome- er, sorry, Washington- protects its unique interests.
Living here means you do not have to accept reality. Or better said, you only have to accept reality to the extent that you have to identify someone else who is going to pay for the return to normalcy.
Wait, that was the Harding Administration, wasn’t it?
Maybe the right answer is to ask those of us here in Washington to live in the same country you do.
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com