Washington's "Hunger Games" Approach To Government, Part 1: Rich In Washington, Poor Everywhere Else

One of our most popular posts of all times is at the following link:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2011/04/marie-antoinette-and-arrogance-of-our.html

It discussed a number of examples where members of the Washington political class were condescending, arrogant, and downright rude to their constituents. It was as if we were reliving the Marie Antoinette era where the ruling class could not care less about the challenges, welfare, and issues facing the ordinary citizens. They were more interested in their own comfort and self enrichment, making them so out of touch that when they were told their citizens had no bread to eat their haughty response was to let them eat cake.
Our political class in D.C. is not much different:

• Their annual salaries of over $170,000 a year put them in the top 3-4% of all earners in this country but they work less than half a year in session or with their constituents.
• Their lavish benefits add about another $100,000 to their annual compensation package.
• House of Representative members get the American taxpayer to lease a car for them while in office (and what they lease for themselves are not small compact cars).
• They have large staffs that look after their every need while they reside in extremely nice offices.
• Their retirement benefits are embarrassingly lavish for embarrassingly little work.
• Congressional rules allow them to participate in private company IPOs as insiders, which usually result in very profitable investments in very short timeframes.
• Up until recently, they were allowed to privately trade stocks in their personal investment portfolios which leveraged insider government information they knew but most of the world did not know.
• They have rigged their pay processes to automatically guarantee them an annual pay raise regardless of how poorly they performed their jobs during the year.

Yes, the political class has made life very good for themselves. However, in the process, they have made life very good for others that they interact with in their duties as a politician. Recent news reports depressingly illustrate how America is turning into the “Hunger Games” scenario.

In the “Hunger Games” books there is a very, very small, elitist set of people in the seat of power, far away from the common folks, both in geography and life style and options. The elitists have manipulated their government so that vast amounts of taxpayer wealth flows to this seat of power to the detriment of the rest of the country. Those in the seat of power enjoy self enrichment, status, pomposity, and gluttony, in its many forms, all on the backs and hard efforts of the rest of the citizens out in the country and hinterlands.

Let’s start with the first research report from Reuters that was summarized on their website on December 18, 2012. The details of their analysis include the following facts and trends, listing in no particular order of insult:

• The top 5% of households in Washington, D.C., had average incomes over $500,000 in 2011, while the bottom 20% earned less than $9,500 - a ratio of 54 to 1.
• This ratio is up from 39 to 1 just twenty years ago and is higher than the ratio in all 50 states and all but two major cities.
• The article observes that not only does the Federal government redistribute wealth to lower income people but it also redistributes wealth up to wealthy people, that mostly involves themselves and those that come to the political class for favors.
• In 2010, the Federal government directed $83.5 billion to contractors, lobbyists and lawyers just in the District of Columbia area, mostly as a result of our bloated defense budget.
• Even when taking inflation into account, this $83.5 billion is an increase of more than 300% since 1989.
• With the exception of the state government budgets in California and Texas, this locally distributed $83.5 billion is larger than each of the other 48 state government budgets.
• Private industry and their lobbyists spent more than $3 billion on lobbying Washington politicians to get their piece of the $83.5 billion.
• This lobbying is nearly double what it was just ten years ago.
• According to the 2010 Census, 10 of the capital's surrounding counties place in the top 20 counties across the country when measuring median household income, this is up from six counties in 1990. We can safely assume that most of this wealth has been generated in some shape or form from the Federal budget process and growth.
• But not everyone in the greater D.C. has been getting wealthier since 1990, just the wealthy are getting wealthier, as we see from the following Reuters graph (double click on the graph for a larger view):

　

　　
　

• Direct spending by the Federal government accounts for 40% of the D.C. metro area’s $425 billion-a-year economy.
• About 15% every dollar from the entire Federal procurement budget stays in or around the D.C. area even though the area accounts for only 2% of the national population: "We're seeing an enormous transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the Washington economy," said Steve Fuller, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University.
• Since 1990, five of the top 10 major defense contractors have moved their headquarters to the Washington area, where the money is to be lobbied and procured.
• The greater Washington area has produced 385 of the nation's fastest-growing small- and medium-sized companies since 2000, more than any other metropolitan area in the country: "It's the rich getting richer phenomenon," said Dane Stangler, the Kauffman's Foundation director of research. "Because Washington has a concentration of high-growth companies, that attracts higher-skilled people to work there, which will attract more companies."
• While the average household income in the U.S. has fallen below $50,000, in Washington, area workers with incomes above $100,000 rose to 22% of the workforce, up from 14% in 1990.
• In addition, there are 320,000 Federal jobs in the Washington area and within the actual District of Columbia, 55% of those jobs pay $100,000 or more a year.
• How much taxpayer wealth is at stake in the D.C. area can be measured, to a degree, by lobbyist activity: 13,000 lobbyists registered with the Federal government last year and reported $3.3 billion in fees, about $260,000 per lobbyist; that’s 22% more lobbyists and 37% more inflation-adjusted revenue per lobbyist than in 1998.
• The number of lawyers in the greater D.C. metro has jumped 44% since, twice the national rate, to 41,000 since 1999.
• The D.C. area lawyer annual average income, adjusted for inflation, has risen 35% in that timeframe to $156,000.
• The number of organizations with a political presence in D.C, has more than doubled between 1981 and 2006 to nearly 14,000, according to a study by political scientists Kay L. Schlozman, Sidney Verba and Henry E. Brady.

The entire Reuters article, with the associated data sources for the stats listed above can be found at:


http://www.reuters.com/subjects/income-inequality/washington

Lots of depressing statistics, but really one main message: the growth of the Federal government has spawned obscene growth in Washington D.C. economy that is orders of magnitudes more than the growth of the economy in the rest of the country. The political class has set themselves up as auctioneers of our taxpayer wealth to the highest bidders and those that benefit from these oversized, bloated government budgets have migrated to this seat of power in D.C.

Now, this elitist class of people, the Marie Antoinette’s of our time, might be tolerable if they produced resolutions to the major problems facing America. But, alas, they have been too busy eating their own cake.

We have gone decades without resolving any of our major issues: our lost war on drugs, our leaky borders, our lack of an illegal immigration strategy, our escalating health care costs, our failing public schools, our skyrocketing national debt, our lack of a national energy plan and strategy, etc. We have paid a lot of money for little results.

We will continue this “Hunger Games” discussion tomorrow and beyond, much to the chagrin of us outside of the D.C. Beltway of power.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w