Suppose a new national capitol, Usa, is constructed in the middle of the United States. It is shaped like the United States, with a similarly shaped capitol building.
I think there would be a bunch of positive economic stimulation from the construction expenditures.
There would also be a lot of tourism generated by a brand new capitol. I think there would be a huge party when it opens.
Maybe some minor demand for new maps, globes, and textbooks?
Would security be improved?
Would people want to move from Washington to Usa? (Perhaps there had to have been a terrorist attack to force the move?)
What are the negative ramifications? Obviously, it would leave an economic vacuum at Washington.
What sorts of improvements could be made if we’re starting over from scratch?
And where do these expenditures come from? Government spending is always offset by the fact that the funds are sucked out of the private sector. It doesn’t “stimulate” the economy, it drains it.
Actually, one can argue that some spending yields resultant infrastructure that has a long-term benefit for the private sector. The interstate system, certainly. Subsided mass transit, almost certainly. Obama’s proposed revamping of the national power grid, most likely.
A vanity architecture project in the middle of the country, though… nah.
The capitol is a bulding. Are you saying move the capitol and leaving the capitAl (the city) still the seat of government.
Washington DC never developed into the port/industrial city the original founders envisioned. Largely because Baltimore was too close (For a long while Baltimore was the 2nd or 3rd largest city in America (Up till around the Civil War)
If you’re saying move the capital to a new place it would cause massive unemployment in DC. There’s nothing in DC but government and toursim to support government. Unless you also alloted money for people to move to the new city, you’d for awhile have a mess.
Then you’d have charges of racism if you moved the capital anywhere from DC which is overwhelmingly African American.
In reality the US government (like all levels of government) is so overbloated it’d help in the long term as you’d get rid of a lot of the wasted jobs. But those people who’d you’d put out of work also vote, so that would kill that.
Which reminds me … when I lived in Denver, I often heard it described as a sort of “Washington West”, due to the presence of branch offices of many government agencies. Maybe we already have a second capital, and just don’t know it?
I’m impressed at how much this topic appears to have enraged the SDMB moderators. The OP simultaneously posted two otherthreads examining slightly different aspects of this question, and both have been shut down already. Apparently it’s acceptable to have a zillion simultaneous threads open about Obama or Israel or suchlike, but three questions about relocating the U.S. capital are just beyond the pale.
I think there’s more to this than meets the eye. Something about this seemingly innocuous subject has touched a nerve. A conspiracy is afoot to squelch discussion on this weighty topic. Does someone wish to deprive United States citizens of choice in this matter? Or is the SDMB heavily influenced by architects who refuse the possibility of a Capitol building shaped like the capital city, which is itself laid out in the shape of the nation?
There was a bill introduced in Congress in 1865 to move the capital to St. Louis, MO. (See this thread.) In hindsight, it would have made a lot of sense. St. Louis is centrally located – neither Northern nor Southern, neither Eastern nor Western, convenient to the Mississipi and Missouri waterways, a major central rail hub, and far enough from any shore or border to make foreign attack on it all but impossible (before ICBMs were invented).
Well, it’s certainly NOT because the OP, with all this talk of a new capital named Usa in the middle of the USA that’s shaped like the USA, has inadvertently revealed Phase VII(a)(4)(iii) of the Grand Illuminati Plan for Global Restructuring, the secrecy of which all SDMB Moderators have sworn a blood oath to protect.
We were just trying to keep our forums tidy is all.
South Africa doesn’t have three capitals in the sense that anything is duplicated though. It just happens that parliament is in a different city to the Union Buildings (the “headquarters” of the executive branch).
The judicial branch is supposedly headquartered in Bloemfontein but now that the constitutional court has been constructed in Johannesburg I don’t know how true that is anymore.
There was a movement some years back to move parliment to Pretoria but it didn’t go anywhere. It would have been hugely expensive and as you can imagine there was immense resistance from the city of Cape Town.
I cannot see how a move from Washington DC would not be prohibitively expensive. The physical move itself, as well as all the new buildings, would be enough to make this a non-starter. But even more expensive than that would be moving all the employees, and trying to replace all the employees that do not want to move.
