Seven of the Ten Richest U.S. Counties Seemingly Depend of the Federal Government

According to recent Census Bureau data, seven of the ten richest counties in the United States seemingly depend on the tax- and debt-funded federal government. "Richest" is based on the county's median household income.

1. Falls Church City, VA ($121,250)
2. Loudoun County, VA ($118,934)
3. Los Alamos County, NM ($112,115)
4. Howard County, MD ($108,234)
5. Fairfax County, VA ($106,690)
6. Hunterdon County, NJ ($103,301)
7. Arlington County, VA ($99,255)
8. Douglas County, CO ($98,426)
9. Stafford County, VA ($95,927)
10. Somerset County, NJ ($95,574)

Six of the top 10 counties surrounds the nation's capital in Washington, D.C., home to a variety of federal agencies, departments, and bedroom communities for government workers.  The less obvious member of the list is Los Alamos County in New Mexico, home to the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

When you think of rich counties, which come to mind?  Parts of Silicon Valley are quite affluent, yet Santa Clara County, CA is number 17 on the list.  Marin County, CA is number 19.

You can download the Census Bureau's data spreadsheet here.  The spreadsheet also shows the poorest U.S. counties based on median household income.

A Hidden Gem: Even Authors Get It!

With Tax Day rapidly approaching, I thought I would share a little gem discovered while reading Steve Martini's political thriller, Shadow of Power, embedded on pages 126 and 127.

As dreaded April 15th engulfs me, I have just finished another frustratingly-confusing 80-plus-page love letter to my favorite uncle, Uncle Sam, who seems in constant need of ever more money. My accountant assures me that all is correct, but how am I to know for sure?

I thought about highlighting the particularly good or entertaining sections of this gem but then realized that I would end up highlighting most of it anyway.

"Only the insane of the eighteenth century could foresee that a bleak two lines added to the Constitution a century after its creation, authorizing the collection of a federal income tax, could result in a seventy-year rampage by government to mentally rape its own citizens with millions of pages of totally unintelligible tax laws, rules, regulations, and forms.

"Today we have special federal tax courts because the law is so convoluted that ordinary federal judges are presumed too ignorant and unschooled to understand the complexi­ties of laws and forms that every citizen down to the village janitor is required to understand, to obey, and to sign under penalty of perjury and threat of imprisonment.

"Nor could it be possible in the Age of Reason to foresee a Social Security system that if run by a private business would result in their arrest, prosecution, and conviction for operating a Ponzi scheme. In the real world, taking invested funds in the form of Social Security taxes, paying current claims, and skimming the rest for other purposes is called embezzlement. When government does it, it is simply called politics. In either case the arithmetic is always the same. When the scheme goes belly-up, its operators, if they're smart, will be in Brazil, or, in the case of Congress, retired, which is the political equivalent of being in Brazil.

"With all of this, the people in what is touted as the great­est democracy on the planet have no effective recourse. They cannot act directly to fix any of the obvious open sores or seeping wounds in their own government, because the founders didn't trust them with the only effective medicine, the power to amend their own Constitution. That is reserved the power to a serpent its creators never saw. 

"Short of revolution, something Jefferson urged take place at least every twenty years, the average citizen is left to pound sand by casting a largely empty vote to replace the devil-in-office with the devil-in-waiting and hope that the caustic nature of power to corrupt can somehow be neutralized.

"Praying for the devil to grow a halo, we all plod on, one foot in front of the other, trusting that somehow we will not follow the Soviet Union over the national cliff."

John F. Kennedy's Words Applied to the Modern World

During a recent speech at the CPAC conference, conservative columnist George Will nicely applied President John F. Kennedy's wise words to our current situation and the future success of the United States.

The American people understand ... when Jack Kennedy said 'Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.' One thing that you can do for your country is to reserve a spacious portion of your life for which your country is not not responsible!

Words by which we should all live! Learn how be free of government and government resources.

Here is a nine minute summary of George Will's speech.

Here is a link to the full 30 minute version via C-SPAN.