The Federal Job Machine

[question everything]

From TIME

Thursday, Feb. 08, 2007
The Federal Job Machine
By Justin Fox

When the Census Bureau announced last August that northern Virginia's Loudoun County had become the nation's most affluent, with a median household income of $98,483, it was something of a shock to locals. Loudoun is far from exclusive: a third of its 255,000 residents arrived in the past half-decade. The median house sells for $440,000. These Loudounites are not trust-fund babies or Wall Street zillionaires but youngish professionals with kids to raise and mortgages to pay off. For those who fret that America has lost its way, that all the good jobs are being outsourced to China or India, that regular folks can't get ahead anymore, Loudoun and its neighboring counties seem to offer a resounding corrective. From 2000 to 2005, the Washington metropolitan area, of which Loudoun is part, added 359,000 jobs--much more than even such Sun Belt boomtowns as Phoenix, Ariz., and Dallas.

(snip)

That it is also a strip-malled, traffic-clogged mess does not take away from the fact that it is one of the great economic success stories of our time. With Fairfax County leading the way, the Washington area is becoming a job machine. So why aren't regions around the country trying to emulate it, as they did Silicon Valley in the 1990s? The simple answer is that they can't. "If you can force the rest of the country to send you money or go to jail, it does wonders for your economy," says northern Virginia writer and noted urban thinker Joel Garreau. Stephen Fuller, who runs the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University in Fairfax, puts it more gently: "It's nice to have a rich uncle."

That would be Uncle Sam. Yes, there are purely private jobs in the region: drive among the dense thickets of office buildings in Tyson's Corner and along the Dulles Toll Road, and you see some impressive corporate HQs--Capital One, Freddie Mac, Gannett, Sprint Nextel. But you also come across mysterious acronyms like BAE, CSC, MITRE and SAIC. These are big-time government contractors, and when Fuller looks closely at job growth in the area, it is mainly these that he sees.

(snip)

There have been times, especially during the late 1990s tech boom, when some business folk in the area thought they had outgrown their rich uncle. But their post-2000 experience, when other tech centers floundered but northern Virginia boomed, taught them otherwise. "You had your stable base coming from government contracting, and then you had this explosion around telecom, IT and the Internet," explains former Virginia Governor Mark Warner, who was a co-founder of Nextel and later a venture capitalist. "Then, after the bubble burst, you had this unfortunate need to build a homeland-security industry." So for the past half-decade, the strongest regional economy in the nation has been fueled by demand not from Internet-addled, cell-phone-addicted consumers but from government drones charged with keeping us from getting blown up. This is great for northern Virginia. It's less reassuring for the rest of the country.

(snip)

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1587284,00.html

[SahaleArm]

1. Not surprising...

Government contracting, lobbying, and legal work pays better in the Beltway. Sadly the Blue states are paying for it, doling out more federal taxes than they take in. Take the (private) money out of politics and most of Northern Virginia would dry up. Of course Northern Viginia gave us Senator Jim Webb so all is not lost.

BTW Fairfax county has some of ugliest McMansions on the planet.

[whistle]

2. How many are Washington DC lobbyists and lawyers?

[question everything]

3. Most of them, as implied by the article

and this by a so called "small government."

[AnnieBW]

4. Beltway Bandits

The term "Beltway Bandits", which refers to these contracting firms, has been around for decades.