New information from the Census Bureau confirms that the Swamp is still the Swamp. Between 2013 and 2017, the five wealthiest areas in America by median income were Loudoun County, Virginia; Fairfax County, Virginia; Howard County, Maryland; Falls Church City, Virginia; and Arlington County, Virginia. Wealth has been accumulating in the environs of our nation’s capital for ages, but we take the opportunity of the new data to ask the question: Why? Are the residents there more productive, harder working, just more capable of generating wealth? No, dear reader, we regret to say that this is not the reason.
The reason—as readers of The Scrapbook know full well—is that there are lots of government teats in the area and lots of people slurping from them. There are, most important, hundreds of thousands of federal workers in the region, and their average salary—not counting benefits—easily exceeds $100,000. Add the attorneys, lobbyists, contractors, and consultants all waiting their turn to suckle, and you have the wonderland of wealth that is the greater Washington, D.C., area.
As ever, the best and most reliable business of all is government. Federal salaries exploded under George W. Bush, and between 2001 and 2011, federal workers saw their pay and benefits grow at double the rate of the private sector’s. Today the average federal worker’s compensation is around double the private sector average. When Barack Obama assumed office, the country was in the throes of a devastating recession with double-digit unemployment. That didn’t stop him from presiding over a 7 percent growth in the federal workforce over his first two years.
It’s too early to tell what the Trump years will reveal, but we see no signs of anything different. That giant sucking sound you hear (to borrow a phrase from Ross Perot) is not the sound of a swamp being drained.