edit: thank you all for your travel suggestions, but this was a tongue-in-cheek way of trying to point out the absurdity of the OP's comment about DC not being the "real world".
Comparatively, the other major metropolitan areas in the U.S. produce some product/service that is competitive in the common market: tech things (SF-Bay Area), financial services (NY), entertainment (LA), more tech things (Seattle), etc. [0] Another way I think about it is that these other metro areas have to produce something that people would want to exchange dollars for because they provide more value to them than their dollars.
The thing that separates D.C. from these other metros (and for lack of a better term, "the real world") is that the value-determination mechanism of exchanging dollars for goods/services is completely different than the other cities (and I would argue much worse). Government has little incentive to spend less and consequently seek goods/services that provide the best value. In fact, the U.S. federal government has quite the opposite motivation. Every department is incentivized to spend as much as possible within their allotted budget (which hardly ever decreases year-over-year), lest they demonstrate that they could actually perform their functions with less money than has been allotted to them (gasp!). This phenomenon can be observed in the frenzy to spend all the budgeted money by the end of the fiscal year. [2]
The end result is a city that continuously spends more money for goods/services that are almost orthogonal to providing value (since that is not their point). There's something perverse in the fact that of the ten highest median income counties in the U.S., 50% of them are in this area that produces goods/services of dubious to no value. [1]
[0] Apologies to anyone if I caused offense at these gross oversimplifications of their cities.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie...
[2] Anecdote: I literally worked on a project for a three-letter agency to develop an ML model that would identify which budgeted funds were "in danger" of going unspent by the end of the fiscal year. Leadership loved it. What was a manual process involving countless person-hours that usually began in late spring to comb through the budget, could be supplemented by a model-based prediction in February.
I wonder what kind of land use policy creates this phenomenon.
DC is absurd, it consists almost entirely of people who live off the rest of the nation's tax dollars and yet look down upon the people who subsidize their lives. OP was pointing out the fact that the rest of the nation was suffering during the recession but DC was untouched because their jobs and lifestyle are ensured by government funds