Wyoming (which has substantially fewer people than D.C.) will be disappointed to learn that, in terms of population, it “does not come close to being in the same league as a state.”
Population as of 2005: 582,000 (give or take). This would appear to make it the third or fourth largest Maryland county (out of 24(?)).
I suggest that that is more than “none-to-important.”
Wyoming does not have “substantially fewer” people; as of 2006 it was estimated to have only 66,000 fewer residents. They are roughly comparable, and both behind #49 (Vermont) by not that much.
Do go on, tell me more about how DC has no culture other than big white marble monuments and poor black people. Why, I never knew that all my neighbors had it so bad! Your views about the National Guard needing to be called out after the murder rate has gone down 60% in the last 15 years are particularly intriguing, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
LOL! Do you want to be part of Maryland?
If nobody else wants it, I’ll take it.
D.C. has 13% more people than Wyoming. I’d say whether that’s “substantially” more is YMMV, rather than true/false.
That’s another reason Maryland wouldn’t want it back – the existing Baltimore-area political establishment would prefer to remain the one and only big fish in that pond.
Not particularly. I think there ought to be a principled, not a pragmatic, solution to giving the people of DC a vote in Congress. I see a constitutional amendment as correcting a pretty dumb provision in the Constitution, but merging Maryland and DC as just a way of getting around said offending provision.
A better solution would be a new state of Columbia that would include the entire Washington Metro Area – DC, plus the suburban counties of MD and VA. Of course, the MD and VA legislatures definitely would have to approve of that.
How would that be a “better solution”? As a Northern Virginian, it’s bad enough that Richmond sees the region as a cash cow for the rest of the state. It’ll be ten times worse if we have to subsidize Washington’s government instead.
Agreed. That solution just makes no sense.
A metropolitan area is a single economic organism. It needs a metro government to plan for metro concerns. Think about it. Don’t you really have more interests in common with the people of Montgomery County, MD – or even, those of DC itself – than you have with the people of Culpeper County, VA?
In some ways, yes, I do have more interests in common with somebody from Montgomery County than I do from somebody in Culpepper County. But I also know that the city of Washington DC has almost no tax base, and that they have, even with the government subsidies they get, an income tax rate of 9.3% compared to Virginia’s income tax rate of 5.75%. I also know that the poverty rate in Fairfax County is around 3.6%, while in Washington, DC, it’s around 16.9%.
I also know that if we did become one state, the political process would be dominated by the people and the leaders of the city of Washington, and that they don’t particularly care much for NoVa, nor do they have our best intersts in mind.
Why? The suburbanites would outnumber them.
Specifically: The population of Washington, D.C., is only 582,000. The Metro population is 8 million.
You must be including Baltimore and its suburbs in that. No way that the D.C. area, by itself, has that many. I’m coming up with 5.5 million for the DC area, with a definition of the area like so: on the Maryland/DC side, everything between the Potomac and the Chesapeake from the Montgomery/Howard/Anne Arundel arc of counties, south; and on the Virginia side, everything between Loudoun and Prince William Counties, inclusive, and the Potomac.
Nonsense. Just because Jersey City is in New York doesn’t mean that its proximity to New York is a “problem” in any sense. When I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, there wasn’t any compelling need to make San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland and Fremont in the same county, for example, to plan for “metro concerns.” I mean, do you seriously believe that communities not in the same political subdivision are incapable of talking to each other?
The fact is that there are a good many Marylanders and Virginians who live just out of DC who identify strongly with their state. Saying that they ought to belong to a different state to make bureaucracies “work better” – an unfounded claim in any case – would be probably the worst possible reason to disenfranchise people from the states they may have lived in their whole lives.
What’s more important, folks from Greenbelt or Alexandria would have to be nuts to want their elected officials to have to deal with the crazies we elect. Folks in DC wouldn’t want to have the McMansion-living “build more freeways so I can drive my Hummer everywhere” folks of McLean and elsewhere have more of a say in our business.
It’s a solution that serves nobody’s interest.
I got about 4.75 million. I didn’t count Anne Arundel, though, because, DC metro area or not, there’s no way that Maryland is giving up Annapolis. So, my list was, in Maryland, Charles, Prince George’s, Montgomery, and Howard counties, Washington, DC, and in Virginia, Arlington, Fairfax, Loudon and Prince William counties, and the cities of Alexandria, Fairfax, Falls Church, Manassas, and Manassas Park.
This all sounds contrived. Why not just give D.C. Statehood?
Why not just leave things they way they are?