Bloomberg Confirms MTRMedia.com Report – Washington DC Sucking US Dry
MTRMedia.com did a series of reports and observations from my 7 weeks this summer in our nation’s capital. It was clear to the naked eyes that unlike the rest of the country and especially East Coast cities like New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore that the DC Beltway area was a thriving metro area where the Recession was something that you just heard about on the TV news.
The attitude was like what’s wrong with those ‘other’ folks things are great here.
What is wrong with those ‘other’ folks is that in conjunction with having to deal with a Wall Street / Congressionally created economic recession they are also being overtaxed. That taxed money makes its way to DC where they take 20 or 30 or 40% off the top for themselves and then spoon feed what is left it back to the states for them to fight over the crumbs.
It looks more and more like the US is going for the North Korean model.
Check out the original story for MTRMedia.com:
North Korea's Now... America's Future
Bloomberg Excerpts:
DC turns Silicon Valley into Death Valley:
Federal employees whose compensation averages more than $126,000 and the nation’s greatest concentration of lawyers helped Washington edge out San Jose as the wealthiest U.S. metropolitan area, government data show.
The U.S. capital has swapped top spots with Silicon Valley, according to recent Census Bureau figures, with the typical household in the Washington metro area earning $84,523 last year. The national median income for 2010 was $50,046.
Kevin Zeese, director of Prosperity Agenda: “There’s a gap that’s isolating Washington from the reality of the rest of the country,” “They just get more and more out of touch.”
Total compensation for federal workers, including health care and other benefits, last year averaged $126,369, compared with $122,697 in 2009, according to Bloomberg News calculations of Commerce Department data. There were 170,467 federal employees in the District of Columbia as of June. The Washington area includes the District of Columbia, parts of Northern Virginia, eastern Maryland and eastern West Virginia.
‘Shallower Recession’
The flow of federal dollars in and around the nation’s capital helped the region weather the economic slump better than most areas and is contributing to its recovery. The unemployment rate in the Washington metro area in August was 6.1 percent, compared with 10 percent in San Jose, according to Labor Department figures. Nationally, joblessness was 9.1 percent in September for a third straight month.
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Federal government spending for programs excluding Social Security and Medicare in fiscal year 2011, which ended on Sept. 30, rose to $2.38 trillion from $2.3 trillion the previous year.
Lawyer Capital – Kill all of them!
Last year Washington also had the most lawyers per capita in the U.S. compared with the 50 states, with one for every 12 city residents, according to figures from the American Bar Association and the Census Bureau. In New York State the figure was one out of every 123 residents, while in California the ratio was one in 243.
Associate attorneys in the Washington area who have worked between one and eight years had a median salary of $186,250, compared with the national median for their peers of $123,521, according to a survey by the Washington-based National Association for Law Placement.
Contractor Central No Surprise
The Washington suburbs are also home to government contractors such as Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT), the world’s largest defense company, and General Dynamics Corp. (GD), the Falls Church, Virginia-based maker of Abrams tanks and Gulfstream business jets.
With about 5.6 million residents, the Washington region has an aggregate household income of about $221.4 billion.
Check out the full Bloomberg report:
