We are sorry to report that the swamp is winning. It’s almost like a scene from the dystopian movie The Hunger Games, where the wealthy and powerful who reside in the fortress capital city, live comfortably in a life of luxury and everyone else is scraping to get by.

DC now has the country’s richest rich people:

The numbers for Maryland and Virginia are a little misleading, because the wealthiest areas of those two states are in the D.C. metro area. According to the Census Bureau, for 2023, the DC area has four of the ten wealthiest counties (population 65,000 or more) in the country by median household income:

These statistics remind us of the adage that Washington is a city where people come to do good, and they end up doing well.

Mark Penn, a former pollster for President Bill Clinton, says one thing most Americans agree on is that a pampered “ruling class” of bureaucrats, Beltway bandit contractors, consultants, and lawyers seem to have their noses permanently in the federal trough. Beltway Americans earn a living from directly or indirectly having an employer that not only never has to make a profit but can forcibly take money through taxation.

As our landmark Them v. U.S. study found, these elites are not like the rest of us – particularly on the questions of freedom v. government control and related proposals to strictly ration gas, meat, and electricity in the name of climate change: