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Comment by threemux | Hacker News Reader

One thing the government could do right away that would serve to spread out good jobs is move executive branch departments to other states. For example, let's move the USDA to somewhere in the Midwest. Government employees would move there as would contractor staff and all kinds of ancillary business serving the above.

Remote work helps too but the increase in supporting businesses that serve onsite employees is important for an area

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DC is called the swamp for a reason, spreading those jobs around would make life more difficult for lobbyists and other parasites who extract wealth from tax payers so it will never happen.

DC is run like it's still the 1700s despite all the technology that makes it pointless for everything to run in DC. Logically having all leadership concentrated in a single place is a huge risk, but they won't change it

> DC is called the swamp for a reason

Two main reaosons:

1. Political propaganda by (mostly, unusually corrupt) politicians cultivating an crusading pure outsider image by encouraging people to focus on negative inages of the soace the politician is seeking to enter and ignore the details of the politicians own personal record, and

2. The fact that it is built on a literal, not at all metaphorical, swamp.

NoVa is the richest area in the nation, even more than NYC or SF. What is produced there? What businesses were founded there to create such wealth? None, it's all wealth extracted from the citizens, and the people in DC mock and look down on the people they need to survive

I personally know people who have made millions by lobbying to create BS grants and other funds using tax payer money and then getting money through them. Anybody with actual exposure to DC is disgusted by it.

How are you calculating richest area in the nation?

I don’t think this would help if your goal is not rapidly increase housing costs. If covid proved anything about the housing market, it’s that theres a housing shortage everywhere. Plenty of LCoL areas still have disproportionately high housing costs compared to median income now. When remote work was required, people fled cities and led to housing crises in areas that aren’t just major cities.

Great piece from M. Nolan Grey, who is an excellent twitter follow: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/housing-cr...

Federal agencies are pretty distributed already. In fact, there are many (MANY!) small towns throughout the country where the US Government or a contractor that's essentially a feeder for the US Government is the biggest employer there.

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