Real Sequester "Victims"

Washington DC Area
Outstrips National Incomes

Since 2008 there have been tales of woe nationwide of householders forced to default when they couldn’t refinance their mortgaged underwater homes, who abandoned their depreciating and overpriced homes in despair, who stopped making mortgage payments and suffered foreclosure and eviction, or spent years begging for and negotiating short sales with lenders to escape properties that had become a yoke on their finances and their families.  Not so in the Washington DC area.  Huge surges in federal expenditures made the National Capitol Region recession proof and enriched hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors.   Households throughout the region, despite in many cases being deeply in debt and highly leveraged, never felt the pain. 

Washington DC
The Toast of Obama

I lived in and around the area for 34 years and can personally vouch how Easy Street inside of the Capital Beltway works.  I bought our little brick colonial house a mile from the Pentagon and a mile and one-half from DC on a 5,600 square foot lot in Arlington, Virginia for $209,900 in 1998.  The house sold June of last year for $737,500.  It pays to live where Bernanke prints the money, Geithner borrows the money and Obama spends it.  And guess what?  No real economic activity, no manufacturing and no pollution except from those pesky government commuters puttering about.  It’s a wonderful life!

Now that Obama's vapid sequester lies (Obama is still saying janitor's at the Capitol are getting a pay cut even though their boss says no layoffs are anticipated) have been silenced, the ever present "economists" and some of the mainstream media offer a surprisingly realistic report on the sequester,

The nation's capitol and nearby Virginia and Maryland will likely feel the worst of the impact. States heavily-reliant on federal spending - as far away as New Mexico - are also in for some rough weather.  With half of the roughly $85 billion in cuts targeting the Pentagon, the impact will be heavily concentrated in D.C., Virginia and Maryland, where defense spending accounted for about 10 percent of the three states’ combined economies in 2010, according to a report last month from Wells Fargo economists Mark Vitner and Michael Brown.

Let's look at the affected areas.  The following lists the top ten median income counties in the U.S. – 7 of the top ten nationwide are in the DC area.

Rank	County	State	Median Household Income	Population
1	Loudoun County	Virginia	$119,134	325,405
2	Fairfax County	Virginia	$105,797	1,100,692
3	Arlington County	Virginia	$100,735	216,004
4	Hunterdon County	New Jersey	$99,099	128,038
5	Howard County	Maryland	$98,953	293,142
6	Somerset County	New Jersey	$96,360	324,893
7	Prince William County	Virginia	$95,146	419,096
8	Fauquier County	Virginia	$93,762	66,320
9	Douglas County	Colorado	$93,573	292,167
10	Montgomery County	Maryland	$92,909	989,794

The Washington Post has headlined “Government dollars fuel wealth: D.C. enclaves reap rewards of contracting boom.”  Bloomberg has reported the DC Metropolitan area is “the wealthiest U.S. Metropolitan area,” even “richer than Silicon Valley.”

So 1, 2, 3, let’s cry great big crocodile tears for the poor souls who will be most affected by the sequester.  All together now!  Boohoo!  Boohoo!  Boohoo!