I hadn't realized that Greater DC has the country's highest median income. Good for us!
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Fact of the Day
10 Nov 2007 04:00 pm
Comments (22)
The fact that residents of all races enjoy high median incomes in the Washington region is a product of the area's "knowledge" economy
I'm assuming by "knowledge" that he means knowing how to line your pockets. Glenn Greenwald points out how it's done.
but bad for the country, as it is probably an indicator of the plutocratic control of government.
You had any doubts about it? Capitol cities are always wealthy, for the reasons related above.
Yeah, great. The nation's highest median income is in the area where the principal industry is getting the feed trough tilted in a particular direction. Absolutely wonderful.
A sign of corporate influence and plutocracy would be a low median income coupled with a high mean income. A high median income is a pretty good sign, though it still allows for the (likely) possibility of an underclass.
It should be noted that those figures only include money earned over the table and not, for instance, junkets, hookers, drugs, drugged hookers, Brazilian sex tours, in-kind contributions, bags of cash, and the like.
P.S. If you read the link, you'll see that the news for NYC and LA isn't so good, and there are even problems in his area for the same reason. But, MattY can ignore those issues, since he's made it clear that he's willing to trade what's in the best interests of the U.S. for having access to a wider variety of restaurants.
Great. Banking in New York is getting hit, media and technology on the west coast is getting hit, manufacturing is practically gone...
But don't worry about the economy... D.C. is doing just fine.
"Good for us!"
Bad for the taxpayers.
Seriously, this explains a lot about why the pundit class is so out of touch with American reality.
London is the richest part of Britain - It's just a symptome of empire. What did you expect to be the richest? The meth belt, the rust belt, and the heartland are all in recession.
How rare a moment, when I find myself agreeing with the crypto-racist Sailer (maybe not so crypto).
He's right on this one, though, Yglesias; there is something very unseemly in your pronouncement, especially when viewed from out here in the rusting, recessioning provinces.
I work for the gov't and make a pretty good living here in Maryland, but I don't know where the big money comes from. No one I know who works for the gov't is buying the $700k starter homes. Yes, there are people pulling down big bucks, I just don't know how they do it.
People underestimate the extent to which industries with less direct connection to politics (unlike lobbying and consulting) have a decent-sized presence in DC (banking, etc.). It's not just only corruption. It's become one of the places young graduates interested in business go to now with its healthy youth culture and its good business prospects. It's not all just the federal teat.
"A high median income is a pretty good sign, though it still allows for the (likely) possibility of an underclass."
Agreed, although if the Sally Quinn article that Matt linked last week paints an accurate portrait, DC is more stratified than the typical American city. The DC elite doesn't realize that they are living in a city because most of the population doesn't count.
Big-government Republicanism has been very good for the Beltway Bandits.
I don't know if Sailer is a racist or not, that word has been bandied about here since the immigration debate in some pretty meaningless ways, so it's hard to take anyones word for it.
And if the people here haven't heard much of the poverty in D.C., I'm wondering how far out of their way they've had to go to do so. That enough lobbyists have moved to D.C. to overcome all the poor black folk that the elite treat as slaves there doesn't negate the fact that the later exist.
This is why Ron Paul is coming for your ass.
Knowledge economy my ass. It the corrupt influence peddling economy.
How could anyone not know that the Beltway environs would be the richest by average area in the world? Make no mistake by the way, we are talking about the world here. DC #1. It's so freaking obvious that the point where corporate and government power meld that money flows like a river. A river of money flows through it. How could anyone with any awareness of the current economic system not know down to their bones that average incomes there are stratospheric.
If you didn't know that then you better keep off the economic stuff because your naive in the extreme. Well at least MY admits to it.
The biggest story of Post WWII American history is now being played out in the economic sphere and it is practically invisible. Being called the subprime crisis, which is a joke. It isn't a subprime crisis, it is a systematic economic crisis which will be the exclamation point on the relative decline of America. Iraq and the GWOT are just a sideshow, a symptom.
Not so great for everybody in the distict, though.
[T]he District ranks third in income inequality among cities with populations of 300,000 or more. Non-Hispanic whites in the District have a median household income of $91,631, and the figure drops to $34,484 for blacks. Hispanic residents fare only slightly better, with a median household income of $43,547. Asians have a median household income of $67,137.
It's very surprising, to say to the least, to see a liberal equating wealth with success. I thought it was the Republicans who were supposed to do that.
Do you think that a richer city or country or society is necessarily a better one? Do you really think that wealth is an end in itself? Do you not at least in principle recognize the principle that a society could be suffering from too much rather than too little?
If any economic statistic should have significance it shouldn't be how much wealth there is, but rather how that wealth is distributed. DC seems to fare rather poorly in that regard.
'I hadn't realized that Greater DC has the country's highest median income.'
No, *amongst* the country's highest median income. Palo Alto and Manhattan can still breathe easy.
"as one expert put it, has boosted the median income of all ethnic groups to among the highest in the nation."
Comments closed November 24, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
It's all those Federal employees sucking at the taxpayer's teat. (It's OK for me to say; I used to be one. Still sucking on it, only in retirement now.)
Posted by Traven | November 10, 2007 4:23 PM