Ryan Streeter
Follow Ryan on Twitter
That headline is both depressing and telling.
It’s depressing because it shows just how bad it is everywhere else.
It’s telling because it shows just how expansive the federal government is and how sustainable its regional economy is.
According to Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index, released today, the District of Columbia is the only “state” with a positive confidence score (the Index measures all 50 states plus DC). Second place goes to North Dakota, which has a score of -13. Both Maryland and Virginia, which wrap around D.C. and serve as home to a good share of federal agencies and contractors, are in the top ten.
The Gallup authors note:
[T]hose living in and around D.C. benefit from having the federal government as their major industry. And, unlike state and local governments, the federal government has continued to grow even as many other industries have not during the recession and its aftermath.
Yes, it has continued to grow indeed. Michele Bachmann summed up that growth anecdotally while talking with Chris Wallace yesterday (as relayed by Andy McCarthy at The Corner):
We had one employee at the federal Department of Transportation that made $170,000 a year at the beginning of the recession. We had the trillion dollar stimulus and eighteen months into the recession we had 1,690 employees making over $170,000. Government has really been growing at a lot of largesse. But people in the real world aren’t. And that’s what has to change. Government has no conformity at all with the real world.
Those kinds of numbers will definitely boost your confidence during a recession, especially if you're one of the lucky 1,689 DOT employees who scored big during the downturn.
The Department of Labor reported on August 3 that of the metro regions in the country withe more than 1 million people…
…The lowest jobless rate among the large areas was recorded in Oklahoma City, Okla., 5.7 percent, followed by Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, D.C.-Va.-Md.-W.Va., 6.2 percent.
These data matter. It’s very easy living in the Washington area (I did so for 7 years) to allow the larger community to shape your view of how things are going. Even though you read all the numbers and reports, when you don’t know anyone who’s unemployed or who has been hit hard by the recession, it affects you. Good old reliable Scottish moral sentiment theory (a la David Hume and Adam Smith, updated by James Q. Wilson and others) tells us that our moral judgments are affected by the sympathy we have for others, and the sympathy we have for others is shaped most forcefully by those around us.
None of this means that people who work on Capitol Hill or on K Street or in the various federal agencies cannot at all grasp what people are going through across the country. But it does make it easier to get caught up in the politics, beltway battles, and processes of the nation’s capital when no one is feeling especially pressed by the hard times we are in.
If the feudal land is burning on the outskirts but the shade is cool and the wine plentiful in the lord’s manor, the lord will always have time for another game of cards before going out to see what all the commotion is about.
Comments