A Happier New Year for the Beltway

An article in the Washington Post provides another example of how the Washington metro area has become virtually recession-proof:

The Washington region posted the highest year-over-year home price gains in the nation this fall, as real estate values slumped in nearly every other metropolitan area, a key housing report said Tuesday.

A healthy job market, particularly for high-salaried workers, buoyed demand and prices for housing in the D.C. area, local economists said. Home values climbed 3.7 percent in Washington in October from a year earlier, making it one of only four regions nationally to avoid a dip in prices, the Standard & Poor's Case-Shiller home-price index said.

My colleagues David Boaz and Walter Olsen have highlighted numerous examples of how the Washington metro economy has prospered relative to the rest of the recession-battered country.

A map of Virginia’s unemployment rate by county produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is illustrative:

Unemployment rates for counties closest to the “Imperial City” are dramatically lower than the rates for those counties that are further removed. Arlington County unemployment is 3.8 percent, Alexandria City is 4.4 percent, and Fairfax County is 4.6 percent.

As David points out, the Washington region's relative prosperity is a reflection of high pay for federal workers and “the boom in lobbying as government comes to claim and redistribute more of the wealth produced in all those other metropolitan areas.” Like an insatiable parasite, the Beltway class continues to gorge itself at the expense of the country’s productive class.

Taxpaying citizens should bear this in mind the next time they are tempted to look to Washington for “solutions” to the country’s problems.