While incomes and living standards in the rest of the U.S. have been declining since the beginning of the new millennium thanks to the ever-increasing depredations of Big Government, Central Banking and Crony Capitalists on productive Americans, things have been going just swimmingly in the Imperial City of Washington, D.C. According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, average household (inflation-adjusted) income has jumped by 23.3% to $66,583 in D.C. between 2000 and 2012. During the same period median household income for the rest of the country has fallen by 6.6%, from $55,030 to $51,371. Disaggregating the data for the rest of the U.S., only 4 states enjoyed gains while 35 states suffered declines in real income.
When we expand the survey area a bit to include the D.C. suburbs in Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia, where most of the high-level Federal bureaucrats, government contractors, and lobbyists working in D.C. reside, median household income leaps to $88,233. This puts the D.C. metro area at the very top of the list of the 25 most populous metro areas in the U.S. in terms of median household income, revealing an even more glaring and growing income disparity between the political predators and their cronies on the one hand and the private producers of wealth on the other.
The establishment media and many economists and other social scientists continually bemoan the varying income differences generated by voluntary and ever changing consumer choices on the market. In fact, these differences are not a problem at all, but rather the necessary and benign outcome of a dynamically efficient market economy, which rewards all market participants according to their productivity in serving consumer wants. Furthermore, the obsession with “income inequality” obscures the enormity and the very existence of the real problem, which is ”income plundering” of the productive class by the political class. The latter class is composed of politicians, bureaucrats and their allied special interests in the private sector. In the U.S., the political class regularly and forcibly extracts a massive amount of income from productive workers, investors, and entrepreneurs via taxation and money creation (“quantitative easing” and “zero interest-rate policies”) and funnels these stolen funds into its own pockets and those of privileged financial institutions, giant agribusiness corporations, government military contractors, construction unions, etc. Recently, in the U.S. this plundering of productive incomes has grown to an enormous scale, enabled by the huge Federal budget deficits financed by the Fed’s money printing. Plutocratic exploitation, therefore, and not any kind of market failure, is the explanation of the impoverishment of the productive middle class which has been manifested so dramatically in the past decade.
