As measured by household income, nine of the twenty wealthiest counties in the USA surround metro Washington, D.C., or if you will, the Imperial City.
Three of the twenty wealthiest counties are in New Jersey. My wife and I used to live in one of them, and, to top it off, in one of the wealthiest towns in that county. We used to take the Metroliner to and from D.C., observing the depressing conditions along much of the way.
Since my wife is from rural western Penn., and since I’m from a working-class neighborhood in St. Louis, we always felt like misfits on the East Coast. When we later moved to Arizona, our quality of life improved markedly in spite of our income declining markedly.
The hoity-toities who live in these richest counties see themselves as enlightened, cultured, sophisticated, and avant-garde. They actually do despise working-class values and look down on the hoi-polloi in flyover country.
We found them to be stuffy, well-educated but unlearned, way left of center politically, and well-versed in mouthing the politically-correct canards about diversity and sustainability while hypocritically living in 99.9% white enclaves and in large, drafty homes heated with oil, where Teslas are no doubt parked in garages today.
Well-moneyed and politically-powerful people wanted to fund me to run for Congress, but the thought of representing the hypocrites turned my stomach.
When our son was a junior in high school, we visited Georgetown University as a potential school or him. The visitor parking lot was full of Volvos, which were the de rigueur car at the time for East Coast elites. Everyone was dressed as if they were models in an L.L. Bean catalog. During an orientation, one white-bread parent asked a show-off question about diversity at the school. My wife elbowed me in the ribs when I sighed and groaned.
Later, we went on a tour of the campus, led by a preppy female student. She beamed as she pointed out a row house across the street from campus where John Kerry, the future Secretary of State and future husband of a Heinz catsup heir, lived while attending Georgetown. My wife elbowed me in the ribs when I sighed and groaned. (Georgetown University’s school of government is a feed lot where future government leaders are fattened up on a diet of statism.) Our son turned to us halfway through the tour and said, “Let’s get out of here. This place isn’t for me.” My wife elbowed me in the ribs again when I exclaimed, “Hallelujah!”
Many hoity-toities seem to enjoy fouling their own nest. For example, we used to live within walking distance of both a New Jersey Transit train station and a gravel lot where cushy coach buses would pick up investment bankers and other Rulers of the Universe for their commute to Manhattan. Ugly, rusty trash barrels were at both locations, but the barrels were as lonely as the Maytag repairman. Instead of using the barrels, commuters would throw their coffee cups, food wrappings, and other litter on the ground, where the wind would proceed to blow the trash all over the neighborhood. It was beneath the superior status of pampered government workers to pick it up.
Pop quiz: How does a dumpster differ from a parking lot in a wealthy New Jersey suburb? Answer: The dumpster is cleaner.
On a related note, I used to see New Jersians in $60,000 cars lower their windows and throw trash on the road. When I would honk at them, they would give me a puzzled look, unable to connect their action with my reaction. One time I saw a father and his two children get out of an expensive Mercedes and proceed to eat a pizza and drink sodas on a grassy area near a pizza joint. When done eating, they got into the Mercedes and left behind their uneaten pizza, the greasy pizza box, napkins, and the paper soda cups. This is how boorish behavior is passed from generation to generation, like a genetic disease.
Similar behavior can be found in San Francisco, which is surrounded by three counties that also are among the twenty wealthiest counties in the nation. Once upon a time, San Francisco was a clean and scenic city worth visiting. Now it is now overrun by vagabonds, who use sidewalks as urinals—or worse.
The wealthy environs of San Francisco and New Jersey are dominated by left-liberals—by people who espouse community, collectivism, and sustainability. Actually, they demonstrate the tragedy of the commons.
A recent commentary in the Wall Street Journal suggested that federal agencies and their hoity-toity executives should be relocated from D.C. to the heartland, and specifically, to distressed cities like Detroit. (I wrote something similar years ago, saying it would be a way to reduce costs, spread the purloined wealth, and put the government closer to people with pitchforks.)
In closing, below are two great letters to the editor from the December 17-18 Wall Street Journal, in response to the earlier commentary in the Journal.
Regarding Paul Kupiec’s “How the Feds Can Really Spread the Wealth Around” (op-ed, Dec. 9): Another very significant benefit to moving federal agencies out of Washington, D.C., is that this would diminish the Beltway bubble mentality that those working for the federal government are God’s gift to America. In Washington, it seems everybody either works for the federal government or owes his employment to it. It is astounding. The news coverage and conversation on the street often seems focused on how the rest of the country doesn’t appreciate what Washington is doing for those outside the Beltway—all with tax dollars taken from the rest of the country.
Our civil servants seem to have no idea how much resentment exists outside of Washington about overregulation, taxes and the huge unaccountable bureaucracy, much less why this resentment exists. Dispersing the concentrated federal workforce of Washington would do wonders for those federal government employees who are willing to move with their jobs. They would see the real America by living in it. And maybe the rest of us could come to appreciate the bureaucrats as service providers worthy of their pay, and see them as real people, too.
Barry B. Miller, Holladay, Utah
Let’s move the Labor Department to a right-to-work state like Arizona, Agriculture to the farm belt (Kansas City or Lincoln, Neb.), Interior to the West (Cheyenne, Wyo., or how about my home state of New Mexico), Homeland Security to Brownsville, Texas, ICE to San Diego, HUD to Detroit, the SSA and FDA to Florida (where so many of their “customers” live), and the IRS to Fairbanks, Alaska (maybe they’ll sleep through the 24-hour January darkness and leave the rest of us alone). Better yet, the national news organizations would need to put reporters in each of those cities. They might even discover they have a better feel for the pulse of the nation by living among real people.
Greg Woods, Rio Rancho, N.M.
