Side Effects

If, and that's still as specific as one can be, Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says this Tesla investor) and The Musk Ox get their way in gutting employment in the Damn Gummint (which is small potatoes in expenditures), we can contemplate the side-effects of such effort.

And, being from the econ tribe, what might I see the effects on metro DC where most agency main offices reside? The one that comes immediately to mind is a regional housing crash. I lived in The District for all the time I was a Fed, but most bureaurats live in the burbs. By the time I got there, most new housing was being built on the Virginia side, what with Maryland largely taken. The District and Baltimore, downtown to downtown, are about an hour apart. So, you've got about 40 miles of area to make burbs, which was mostly done by the mid 70s.

If you're a new couple, come to DC for civil service, once you get to GS-13 (mid-level worker bee) it's time to get your mortgage. Now, being in civil service (getting there isn't the cake walk the Right Wingnuts blare), you expect that you'll be employed long enough to pay off said mortgage. For those "out in the field", life is a bit different. Some years ago, the GS payrates were regularized to recognize that regional/local cost of living differed, sometimes by a whole lot. But being away from The District often means that you're not in some One Company Town. Make no mistake: the big houses you see when tooling around the Metro Area don't house civil service worker bees, but rather lobbyists and lawyers and other Private Sector Poobahs.

If Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says this Tesla investor) and The Musk Ox manage to cull 10,000 from the rolls, and 80% are central office agency worker bees, what happens to those 8,000 worker bees? At least one of my former colleagues managed to segue from public to private employment, but not because he was thrown out of the Damn Gummint. And he was AB.D. in psychometrics, a somewhat rigorous technical skill. Bureaurat middle managers? Not so much. A lot of those mortgages will default, simply because the DC Metro is not equipped to suck up all those public sector worker bees, like Bounty does in the teeVee adverts. The worker bees' lives will be smashed. And, as elsewhere, private equity will scarf up all those bargain basement houses and turn them into high priced rentals for the next cohort of starry eyed new couples coming to The District to do Good Works. May be Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says this Tesla investor) will get in on the game; make some small change, welcome as it will be, on the hardship. Cruelty is the point.

If the Flaccid Duo get all the way to 100,000, the effect on the DC Metro will be a neutron bomb. Just what they want. There are no Social Goods, only rent extraction (that's an econ term). Andy Jackson, Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says this Tesla investor)'s Idol created, in large measure, the spoils staffing protocol. 19^th century Federal governance was one party's corruption after the other's. A swell time to be an American. Let's all do it again!!