When the government of a free people is flush with almost two trillion dollars of its citizen’s monies, the very smell of all that largess draws the hucksters, the flim flam men, the fakes and phonies in addition to the virtuous to Washington.
The city is awash with cash money. Cash for campaigns. Cash for lobbying. Cash for fat federal contracts. Cash for government consulting. Cash for consulting with businesses doing business with the government. Cash for showing businesses how to get fat federal contracts in the first place. Cash for the native guides who, like the Himalayan Sherpas assisting climbers of Mount Everest, shepherd the bewildered yokel through the maze of federal regulations and the dizzying array of alphabet soup monikered bureaucracies, all manned by self important little people with an agenda and a fiefdom to protect so that their clients can reach Nirvana; the federal teat.
Like some kind of out of control pyramid scheme, the cash moves up the chain from bottom to top with the most lucrative business going to the small cadre of lobbyists who can grab the brass ring – your very own, personal earmark or tax exemption, or legislatively friendly line hastily written in the dead of night into some innocuous bill worth millions of dollars to your company.
Whose keeping track? A few million here. Several hundred thousand there. Since no one sweats the small stuff, the game continues and it adds up somehow to billions coursing through the cracks in the system opened by greed, apathy, and a cynical belief that no one cares because no one is really paying attention.
And the physical manifestation of this rape and sodomy of the taxpayer is on display in the conspicuous consumption of the inhabitants who live, work, play, and spend their money in the surrounding suburbs of Sodom:
The three most prosperous large counties in the United States are in the Washington suburbs, according to census figures released yesterday, which show that the region has the second-highest income and the least poverty of any major metropolitan area in the country.Rapidly growing Loudoun County has emerged as the wealthiest jurisdiction in the nation, with its households last year having a median income of more than $98,000. It is followed by Fairfax and Howard counties, with Montgomery County not far behind.
That accumulation of suburban wealth, local economists said, is a side effect of the enormous flow of federal money into the region through contracts for defense and homeland security work in the five years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, coming after the local technology boom of the 1990s. “When you put that together . . . you have a recipe for heightened prosperity,” said Anirban Basu, an economist at a Baltimore consulting firm.
The result is that the Washington area’s households rank second in income only to those in San Jose, eclipsing such well-heeled places as San Francisco and the bedroom suburbs of New York.
Of course, not all of this is the result of ill gotten or undeserved wealth. In fact, I would hope that the overwhelming portion of it was skimmed legitimately from the government. It’s just that it should be very distressing to anyone who loves liberty and its necessary companion of honest government to stand on a hill and look down on this scene feeling absolute horror and frustration at the place that the American government has come to rest in the early 21st century. Viewed from afar, one feels helpless, almost catatonic when contemplating the enormous effort that goes into devising ever more elaborate and inventive ways to separate the taxpayer’s money from government.
Certainly there are necessary and vital expenditures and businesses that cater to government in a variety of ways and serve the nation honorably in that respect. But then there are the shysters, the gimlet eyed lobbyists like Abramoff who, given enough money, can work miracles with politicians and bureaucrats. Those miracles can take the form of tax breaks geared specifically to your industry or even your individual business; earmarks that crowd legislation with unnecessary expenditures; and even re-arranging a few words or sentences in bills that could spell the difference of millions for a wealthy contributor or golfing buddy.
But the Ambramoffs of Washington are unimportant in the larger scheme of things. It’s the Duke Cunninghams with their reach into the bureaucracies where the real moneychangers operate. The discreet call from a hometown Congressman to the government contracts bureaucrat. Perhaps an invite to lunch or dinner. The shuffling of a few papers. And voila! Not quite illegal. Not entirely unethical. But the deed is done and the constituent is served.
They call it “taking care of the home folks.” What the taxpayers would call it if given the chance is unknown.
I am very happy for the people who live in those three counties around Washington that have now been declared 3 of the wealthiest places to live in the United States. And like good little capitalists, the denizens of those counties have recognized opportunity and grabbed for it. The overwhelming majority of them are blameless, only wanting success and to take care of their families the best way they know how.
But who do you blame? The system? Jesus Christ himself may have thrown up his hands in frustration at doing anything about these defilers of the temple of liberty.
Too much money. Too many compromises with ethics. Too much skirting on the edge of legality. Too many with their hands out and too many with their hands in the cookie jar.
Something has got to change. And the depressing thing is, I don’t even know where to begin.
6:19 pm
I’m with you, Mr. Moran. I’m self employed.
That means I have to pay the whole nut. I don’t have withholding. I don’t have an employer to pay half of my social security. I have to pay 12.4% of my yearly income in social security taxes and then pay income taxes on whatever’s left, minus business expenses.
I had to send several thousands of dollars to the IRS this year, and for what? The War on Terror? Enforcing the Border? Providing for the Common Defense? Investing in the Future? Building roads and schools and hospitals?
No.
It all went to fund some idiot scientist’s $400,000 grant to study the relationship between bovine flatulance and globing warming.
“I have a PhD. And I’m going to study the factual relationship between bovine flatulance and global warming.” (Lifts up a cow’s tail and peers into the orrifice with a magnifying glass.) “Hmmmm. Yes, I see . . .”
“MMMOOOOO! Pphhhhtttt!”
“Global warming!”
I got to pay $40,000 a year for ten years to subsidize that?
It is estimated that 33% of every dollar sent to the IRS is wasted, lost or stolen. That translates into several hundred billion dollars every year wasted, lost or stolen.
What grieves me is that out of the money left, they (the government) chose to chain me in indentured servitude and tax my labor to pay some idiot scientist to write a paper on the relationship between cow farts and global warming.
At the fall of Byzantium, when the barbarians were storming the gate and burning the city, where were the elites, the intellectuals? They were locked in their chamber arguing over how many angels could fit on the head of a pin.
Would that our elites were not doing the same today.
6:25 pm
Ok, Rick, now you’ve gone too far, insulting those who live in the DC suburbs
!! Not all of us have our mouths open to the federal spigot. A lot of the local wealth is tech driven and there are a lot of businesses (like mine) which just happen to be located in the DC area. While the Abramoffs get the headlines, they (thankfully) are a minority.
7:08 pm
I’ll tell you what has to change, bub, you have to change. Suburbs of Sodom? Go to hell.
7:47 pm
Our Founders showed great wisdom when they placed DC in a swamp, hoping that nobody but the most idealistic of individuals would choose to live in it.
Unfortunately, they could not foresee the ingenuity of the slimy reptiles inhabiting it, their almost infinite skills in turning a G-d forsaken hellhole into a gilded fountain in which they could wallow, raping the general populace and living high on the hog while pouring their excrement all over the hardworking souls paying for their excesses.
Of all the planes that could’ve been taken over by the heroics of their passengers on 9/11, it had to be the one directed at the single most expendable sewer in the whole nation?
What a waste.
Well, hopefully G-d will deal with this Sodom as He dealt with the last one.
And there will be much rejoicing when the parasites are purged from the body of our nation.
8:02 pm
Something has got to change. And the depressing thing is, I don’t even know where to begin.
This is a lazy and misinformed post. I am a generic conservative 100% behind the Porkbusters project and, not that it matters, in agreement with much of what I’ve seen on this blog. But greater DC has a stunning diversity of businesses now, two thriving major airports on the Virginia side, universities coming out the gazoo, major biotech, computer- and software-related services, telecommunications, a self-reinforcing velocity-of-money cycle based on local retail, one of the country’s fastest-growing immigrant populations providing every imaginable service at wages far above what they could earn at home; in short, all the elements and critical necessary for the kind of prosperity and dynamism most people actually favor. I’m completely in favor of fighting graft and taxpayer-funded excess, but it’s lazy demagoguery to leap from that to “suburbs of sodom,” and “defilers of the temple of liberty” and by the way, we actually need to spend lots of money on defense and homeland security, partly so I won’t be nuked or attacked with a bioweapon the next time I take the Metro. Hope that’s okay with you.
10:01 pm
I used to live in the DC area (N. VA). I loved the two hour commutes. It was either that or spend 500k for a townhouse near a metro station. There may be money there, but the cost of living is really high, and it’s probably the worst place to commute if you don’t take the metro.
I was just there recently visiting a friend who lives in Louden county actually. He’s a mortgage broker and is making a killing on the skyrocketing real-estate. He’s selling his house – it went from $600k to $900k in three years. $100k a year and all tax-free since he lived in it.
The Dulles corridor is a huge tech mecha and DC is pretty diverse, but I am dreading the day I will have to go back and live there.
10:12 pm
[...] So, I’ll just refer you to two essays, one more of a rant by Rick Moran, and the other by the Anchoress as food-for-thought. [...]
12:11 am
Where to Begin?
A depressing must-read from Rick Moran….
9:03 am
Excellent post, Rick, but there are solutions. It is time to take advantage of modern communication technology and move from a Federal central location to divergent locations for different governmental functions. Put the Department of Agriculture in Nebraska (lot’s of farming there), the Department of State in Hawaii (closer to the Islamic States), the Senate in Florida (the old farts never retire anyway, so work in a retirement area), the Department of Defense in Iraq (if you support the War, more oversight; if you oppose the War, Rummie reaps what he sowed), the Supreme Court in Alaska, the White House in Lower Manhattan, NY and so forth. Would help break up the K Street lobbyist racket, limit the internecine government battles coming from too close proximity, discourage overstaying one’s welcome as an elected official, limit job hopping by federal employees with an agenda, and lastly, allow D.C. to return to the states from whence it came – residents get to vote and be represented and the excessive welfare spigot directed to the District can be shut off.
!
And what a great litmus test. If your Congress person opposes these changes, you know he/she doesn’t have the people’s interest at heart and you can vote them out! Are you with me, people?
A win-win for everyone!
9:53 am
Point of view from someone who grew up in MD near DC: I grew up in (St. Mary’s County) about 50 miles south of DC. Money from the federal government literally turned my little redneck county into another wealthy suburb of DC and figures prominently in local politics – every county on the western shore of MD (and Northern Virginia) fights to keep military bases open. In the case of St. Mary’s, Patuxent Naval Air Station, sent millions (by way of federal contracts) to where I grew up. And honestly, do you expect the people of MD to turn that money away? DC is the center of our government just by way of proximity the surrounding area will prosper. I don’t think it is fair to blame the people of these counties or even their politicians (doing anything short of demanding as much federal $ for your county would be political suicide) All that federal tax money flowing into the suburbs of DC insured that out of college I was given a lucrative job as a with a federal defense contractor and the house my parents bought for 70k in the early 80’s is now worth nearly 300k.
10:56 am
Get rid of the 17th amendment. The loss of state’s rights has led to a mega-federal gov’t.
2:30 pm
Antiterrorists – Don’t forget to cast your curse on Omeed Popal’s mustache!