Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Aaron M. Renn in City Journal writes on the growing prosperity of DC and its environs. Truly, this is a host/parasite relationship as Washington grows at the expense of the rest of the country. And, our salvation will be announced by a depression on the Potomac.
The Washington, D.C., region has long been considered recession-proof, thanks to the remorseless expansion of the federal government in good times and bad. Yet it’s only now—as D.C. positively booms while most of the country remains in economic doldrums—that the scale of Washington’s prosperity is becoming clear. Over the past decade, the D.C. area has made stunning economic and demographic progress. Meanwhile, America’s current and former Second Cities, population-wise—Los Angeles and Chicago—are battered and fading in significance. Though Washington still isn’t their match in terms of population, it’s gaining on them in terms of economic power and national importance.
In fact, we’re witnessing the start of Washington’s emergence as America’s new SecondCity. Whether that’s a good thing for America is another question.
Washington is an artificial capital, a city conjured into existence shortly after the Revolutionary War. Its location was the result of political horse-trading. Virginia congressmen agreed to let the federal government assume the states’ war debts, even though Virginia itself was already paid up; in exchange, the new capital would be located in the South.
The city’s early boosters hoped that its location on the Potomac River would help it grow into a commercial as well as a political capital, but that didn’t happen. While other cities got state backing for their business endeavors—a good example is the Erie Canal, built by New YorkState, which benefited New York City enormously—Washington was run by a Congress more interested in national affairs than in local ones. The city stagnated at first. Its growth finally picked up during the Civil War, but it wasn’t until the Great Depression and World War II, with their expansion of the role of the government in American life, that Washington grew prosperous. During the war, average family income there was higher than in New York or Los Angeles.
It was also a heavily black city—by 1957, the country’s first major city with a black majority. But back in the 1870s, Congress, motivated by racist fears of black votes, had replaced the city’s elected mayors with a board of commissioners appointed by the U.S. president. That change, coming just a few years after black males had won the right to vote in Washington local elections, hobbled the city’s ambitions and set the stage for its troubled legacy in race relations. It wasn’t until 1973, when the civil rights movement had made the disenfranchisement of the city’s blacks untenable, that D.C. regained local control. Unfortunately, a number of factors—including the 1968 riots after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination and a series of disastrous urban policies enacted by the federal government—set the stage for the emergence of political opportunists, including the infamous Mayor Marion Barry. During his tenure in the 1980s, unchecked corruption, ineptly delivered city services, soaring crime, horrendous public schools, financial chaos, and racial tensions made the city a byword for dysfunction nationally. So did the 1990 video that caught Barry smoking crack in a hotel room.
Nevertheless, the metropolitan area surrounding Washington continued to grow and thrive. And when the 2000s arrived, the expansion of the federal government not only catapulted the region into a new league of success but also transformed the troubled city at its center.
During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Washington metropolitan area overachieved on a variety of measurements versus its peer metro areas—that is, the rest of the ten largest metros in the country, plus the San Francisco Bay Area (which federal classifications divide into two, neither of which would make the Top Ten on its own). Among these regions, Washington ranked fourth in population growth from 2000 to 2010, trailing only the three Sunbelt boomtowns of Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston (see “The Texas Growth Machine”). Washington is currently the seventh most populous metropolitan area in America.
The region has performed even more impressively on the jobs front. …
… The city has become, in effect, the Brussels of America. So a wider and wider variety of businesses and organizations must be located there to lobby the government that decides their fate. (According to the Center for Responsive Politics, total spending on lobbying rose from $1.6 billion in 2000 to $3.3 billion in 2011.) These firms pay local taxes. So do their workers, who also buy houses, patronize stores, pay tuition at private schools, employ local doctors and lawyers, and so on. The regulatory superstate is turbocharging Washington’s local economy.
This new basis for prosperity could pay huge dividends to the region. The model here might be the defense industry, which has already centralized many operations in the area. Northrop Grumman, for example, recently moved its headquarters from Los Angeles to Washington. Boeing shifted its headquarters from Seattle to Chicago to be closer to defense operations and customers in Washington. Other industries, such as health insurance, may follow suit. Even if they don’t relocate to D.C. entirely, they’ll need to be represented there. City Journal contributing editor Joel Kotkin has speculated that “when everything from zoning [to] the location of industrial plants and healthcare is under Washington’s control, the capital could conceivably even emerge as a challenger to New York’s two century reign as the country’s most important city.” The mere fact that such heresy can be uttered illustrates Washington’s new power.
So Washington can boast demographic and economic growth, a highly educated workforce, an emerging elite-global-city profile, and regulatory hegemony that ensures that America will continue to pay it tribute, even if the federal government manages to restrain its spending. This looks like a winning recipe locally, and it gives the region a legitimate claim to be America’s new SecondCity.
But it’s a loser for America. Even more than the old leaky-bucket system did, the regulatory superstate depends on inflicting pain on the rest of the country, pain that only Washington itself can relieve—if you pay up and have the right connections, that is. Washington’s fortunes and America’s are increasingly at odds. The region is prospering because it’s becoming something that would have horrified the Founders: an imperial capital on the Potomac.
Daniel Henninger on today’s colossal politics.
Who wouldn’t want to live in Washington? It’s a wonderful world, a place where every problem of life can be reduced to just two words. Gun control. Immigration reform. Climate control. The deficit, which of course can be solved in two words: a “balanced approach.” Things so hard haven’t been so simple since Tinker Bell taught children to fly in “Peter Pan,” also with two words—pixie dust.
Gun control stands out. After the Newtown killings in December, President Obama channeled a national gun-control law through Joe Biden. There was no surprise that he would do so. “If there’s just one life that can be saved,” Mr. Obama said Monday in Minnesota, using standard Washington risk-benefit analysis, “then we have an obligation to try it.”
And so the president will spread gun-control across the land. But consider the discrepancy between the Washington lawgivers and the nation receiving their unitary solutions. Congress has 535 members who work inside the Capitol Building, which you may notice is shaped like a bubble. The rest of the United States consists of 313.9 million individuals spread across a 50-state land mass of more than 9.6 million square miles.
No matter. Mr. Obama’s Washington will try to write a gun law that applies in the same way everywhere for each of the nearly 314 million Americans.
Occasionally Washington looks back at what it has done. In 1993, Congress passed the Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act, which created a national background-check system and a list of people forbidden to own a gun: felons, the mentally ill, persons who committed a domestic-violence misdemeanor, drug addicts and the dishonorably discharged. A year later, Congress passed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, prohibiting 19 models of semi-automatic assault weapons and limiting ammunition magazines to 10 rounds. In other words, they did then what we intend to do again now.
The Brady Law remains in force, but the Assault Weapons Ban expired in 2004. That year, the government formed a panel of specialists at the National Research Council to assess the effects of these gun-control efforts. Its conclusion was that gun-control was a whimper. It said the data on guns and violence “are too weak to support unambiguous conclusions or strong policy statements.”
What they said next is even more pertinent: “Drawing causal inferences is always complicated and, in the behavioral and social sciences, fraught with uncertainty.” Let’s rephrase that. When serious scientists try to solve a problem, they ask, What works? When Washington takes on a problem, it says, Why not? …
John Fund says now the election is over the president can let his inner leftist jerk come out.
The country may be catching on: Barack Obama is our first knee-jerk liberal president. And now that he will never face the voters again, he doesn’t mind showing it.
“There is a deep recognition that he has a short period of time to get a lot done,” says Jennifer Psaki, Obama’s 2012 campaign spokeswoman. So the moderate mask is slipping.
In his second inaugural address, he gave a full-throated defense of the entitlement state and made no mention of reforming Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security before they go bust. He is issuing a stream of executive orders, and he backed the Pentagon’s recently announced plan to lift the ban that kept female soldiers out of combat positions.
Once in a while, Obama still feints to the center. A sharp reaction to his gun-control proposals prompted him to declare that he is sympathetic to gun owners and that he goes skeet shooting “all the time.” The skepticism this boast generated was so rampant that the White House released a photo of Obama holding a shotgun, awkwardly, while skeet shooting. Few people found his claim to enthusiasm for the sport to be credible. Michael Hampton, a top official with the National Skeet Shooting Association, told AP that the photo suggests Obama is a novice shooter. “This isn’t something he’s done very often because of how he’s standing, how he has the gun mounted,” he said.
What is believable is that Obama is showing his true colors. If personnel are policy, there is no better demonstration of his priorities than his second-term appointments. …
Jennifer Rubin says gigantic debt is crushing our economy.
Somewhat overshadowed by the row about the sequester yesterday were the Congressional Budget Office’s very bleak numbers about anticipated debt and the impact on growth. Economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Gordon Gray of the conservative American Action Forum observe, “CBO’s baseline confirms that the nation, despite claims to the contrary, remains on a damaging debt pathway.” They observe that debt will remain over 90 percent of gross domestic product for the period 2013-2023, resulting in a drag on growth equal to 1 percent per year. That translates into a total loss of 11 million jobs for that period. Moreover, by 2023 Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will comprise about 64 percent of the budget, “crowding out other federal priorities.”
The obvious solution is to stop spending so much on entitlement programs. The problem is that the president won’t do that, insisting on raising taxes (a trivial amount compared to the debt but nevertheless another drag on an economy that isn’t growing) or cutting relatively small amounts in discretionary funding (the remaining part of the sequester is less than $1 trillion). As the Wall Street editorial board reminds us, “The budget gnomes say the economy will expand by 1.4% in 2013 and 3.6% on average after that. But every year since 2009 CBO has predicted that a new burst of growth is just a year or two away. Perhaps the Panglosses should revisit their optimism as the new taxes corrode work and investment incentives.” …