I would cure exactly zero things. The things identified in this thread as problems of government are either (1) imaginary, or (2) nothing to do with the geographical location of the capital.
“Washington” (and we have yet to establish exactly what people mean by that in this thread) is exactly zero more “insular” than any other place in the United States.
Whatever problems there are in government have zero to do with the location of the capital or of the “insularity” of its people.
All this amounts to a re-stating of the reverse snobbery that buoys “outsider” campaigns. It’s based on lies and anti-intellectualism. It’s based on the the propaganda that “the people know better than those so-called ‘experts’”-type nonsense.
Well, guess what: The people in Washington are part of “the people,” no less than anyone else.
If you move the capital, you’ll have to move them all along with it, because someone actually has to do the work of government. And the people who do the work of government should be the ones who have spent their lives learning how to do it. Eliminating expertise in government does nothing but put it at the mercy of grifters, crooks, and scoundrels.
@ Heffalump_and_Roo, I’m going to give a general answer to your posts. General because you provide no specifics that can be countered. Washington is insular? What do you mean by that? How would moving it change that in any way? I don’t have a clue from what you said.
I do know that quoting a New York Post article on someone praising Trump is symbolic of the false, ideologically-driven propaganda that the right is spewing against Washington. Trump dislikes the bureaucracy because it is not a business. Civil servants have experience and job protection. They can’t be ordered to break the law and please Trump as he’s had his political appointees do. That’s a strength of the system, one that would be hurt if the system were decentralized or a new capital built.
Remember that the right wants limited government because it implies that fewer taxes need collection from the wealthy and because it reduces or eliminates regulations on corporations. Virtually everything that Trump has succeeded in doing over four years falls into one of these two categories. Why would anyone outside this small group feed into their power fantasies?
The current government does have problems, of course. One major one is that those same wealthy and corporate powers can hire thousands of lobbyists to influence the politicians. Moving the capital elsewhere would see a huge migration of lobbyist offices to the new town, while all other ordinary people would lag behind. It would greatly exacerbate the problem, not mitigate it.
I’m mystified by your saying that metro growth is a contradiction. Of what? The growth is certainly true, though.
I’m with the majority here. Assuming for the purposes of debate that there is something wrong with Washington, what evidence is there that the physical location itself is the cause or contributes to this problem?
As far as moving the capital to, say, Kansas to make it more centrally located, that seems of such a tiny benefit when compared with the massive cost in money and history of moving the capital. I mean, if you are in California, you will most likely have to get on a plane to go to the capital whether that is Washington or Topeka.
Until the OP actually describes the problem and how moving the capital will help, I’m just left scratching my head.
Not sure having a central capital, in this day and age, would be worth the aggro if moving. Which would mean moving much of the civil service and their institutions and cost a lot at a time of fiscal instability. Why move?
This seems like the right answer. We gave half of DC back to Virginia during the civil war, we can give the other half back the Maryland. The number of people affected is just about the number that makes up one congressional district, too, so it would be easy to give them their own congressional rep. Some other state would lose one. I haven’t looked to see which.
Yes, we’d need a constitutional amendment to do it right. It’s not that complex an amendment, though. Who knows, it might possibly pass.
What makes you think physically moving the capital would change that?
I think:
Sure, DC is insular. But Springfield will quickly become insular if that’s where all the power goes. What you propose doesn’t fix anything.
I think there could be some value in moving the capital. Mainly this is because I’d like to have a federal program to encourage people to move to the interior of the country. 50% of our population lives in nine states which is causing problems in the way we govern. Moving the capitol certainly isn’t the best way to do it but the infrastructure improvements and pure population relocation would certainly help some. I’d prefer to nominate Lebanon, KS, as the choice so that we can focus more on building up the center of the country.
I know this idea is a bit out-there for American politics in the present day. I do want to thank people for participating and taking the idea seriously in this debate. To clarify a couple things: No, I am not joking. That does not mean I’m ready to march down to DC and begin protesting until they move the capital, but it’s an idea that I think is worth exploring. However, I also don’t believe this is a political cure-all. It won’t fix cultural or structural problems with how we govern ourselves, and I specifically made the thread looking at the practical benefits that, from my analysis, we would definitely receive.
A couple specific responses.
To Little_Nemo On duplicating monuments
It’s true that three specific buildings would probably be kept as monuments and not re-used: The existing White House, Congress, and the SCOTUS building. That’s a pretty trivial expense overall. I wouldn’t remove the public monuments and
On creating a more limited federal district
In theory that wouldn’t be an issue, but there are numerous problems with actually doing that, and I don’t expect to see that anytime soon. For one, the highest concentrations of population in DC happen to be practically on top of the major Federal sites, such that splitting it off could cause serious issues bother for the Federal district any any new polity cut from it. I have also expressed my reservations about doing so in that thread. As the proposal currently stands on trimming the federal District, I could not in good conscience vote for it.
To Exapno_Mapcase On moving Washington causing a disaster to the national economy
I nearly fell out of my chair laughing at this one. Now, I don’t take you lightly, but there’s several layers of handwave there and I found it amusing. First, the activities of the federal District do not equate to the economy of the entire BWMA, and that’s not a large part of the national economy. Second, the interests of the nation should not be held hostage to homeowners in the area who don’t want to see housing prices decline, and third, the same economic activity would occur elsewhere. Also, I don’t entirely think you believe your own argument. Otherwise you would be demanding, for the good of the country, that we move as many Federal jobs as possible into the area and devote all available spending to it.
Finally, the region is… not exactly known for producing many goods and services that we greatly desired elsewhere. This doesn’t mean they produce none, but DC is not a premier source of technical innovation, financial work, agricultural goods or manufacturing. What it produces, is government. Now that is valuable, but it also doesn’t need to be produced in that specific geographic location nor it is an organic development of the local cultural centers as, say, New York’s financial district finance was created by banks and firms who needed service or wanted to offer them. (I am aware of some industries that are located there, and they wouldn’t necessarily move if the federal district did, either.)
This is so wrong in every single way that it would need a book to respond to it properly.
I’ll just focus on one tiny aspect. Bethesda, MD. It’s not even technically a city, merely an unincorporated community. But it houses the National Institutes of Health, the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, the Consumer Product Safety Commission,
and probably other health related complexes.
What would it take to replicate these facilities in a field in the Midwest? You’re talking about state-of-the-art equipment and thousands of the nation’s finest trained medical personnel. You’re talking enough housing for over 30,000 total employees and their families. You’re talking all the supporting services, suppliers, repair, IT, and specialty operators. You’re talking the stores, restaurants, garages, theaters, schools, libraries, fire and police, etc. for a small city. A rich small city. These high-end professionals aren’t going to live in barracks.
And, remember, the facilities in Maryland have to be kept going while the transition takes place. So you have double expenses, plus the cost of moving what’s movable across the country.
What’s the cost of moving this one tiny sector of the government? $100 billion? $500 billion? $1,000,000,000,000? It could hit a trillion over a generation, which is how long such a move would take. In the meantime, services would suffer through sheer confusion, and the varying policies enacted by a variety of Congresses and Presidents.
Yes, this would blow a hole in the national economy. This, all by itself.
My guess is that you don’t understand what moving the government means. You have some fantasy of building a new capitol and white house and calling it a day. That’s not the capital, and it’s not government. Despite what you say, the government, all the sprawling aspects of it all over the metro region, is an organic entity. It works with itself and feeds off of itself and creates a society bigger than any piece of it, bigger than all of it because government spawns feeders that are as large collectively as the government itself. You may not like that this exists, but you can’t deny its existence is you plan to move or replicate it. The capital isn’t Dorothy Gale’s house transportable to OZ. It’s really, really big.
And while we’re laughing, let’s all laugh at your assertion that the Washington metro area doesn’t produce anything other than government. Check out the Economy section of the Washington Metropolitan Area page. When bigger than Silicon Valley is the topic sentence, you know you’re orders of magnitude wrong.
In this day and age the capital can be anywhere. Put it in Hawaii. It makes no difference.
In olden days travel to the capital was an issue but now travel is easy. Maybe defensibility was an issue too. Back when sacking a capital means you win maybe putting it right on the coast wasn’t the best idea but not an issue today.
Government is tens of thousand seven of skilled people, all the housing, education, services, etc., that support them , billions of dollars in infrastructure, tight networks of necessary information, services, and skills exchange, and other things, including critical pools of skilled workers.
It’s no less "organic than the financial services industry in Manhattan.
Your understanding of what government is seems to be quite flawed.
What difference would we see if there were another large city in the interior of the country?
The vast majority of our political divide is urban vs. rural, not “blue state” vs “red state”. All the “blue” states have “red” areas, and the cities in most of the “red” states are pretty heavily “blue”. Move Washington DC, it’s still a large blue city. I don’t think moving it would change governance at all.
There are ~700K people who live in DC. If we moved them all to the ops suggestion of Joplin, Missouri and they split evenly between KS, OK and MO we would add 230K to each state population. In Kansas Trump got 771K votes to Biden’s 570K if we assume the new population continued to vote for Biden at 93% then we would add 217 for Biden and 16K for Trump. That would move the election to 787K for Trump and 787K for Biden. In OK Trump won 1.02 mm votes to Biden’s 500K and the influx wouldn’t change the top line results but Biden didn’t win a single county in OK and the influx would probably allow a bit more balanced politics. In MO it was 1.7 Trump to 1.25 Biden and again we won’t change the top line results but in this case the states politics will be much more balanced. In the end we will create an additional swing state and bring two red states more towards purple.
Further people tend to either vacation close to were they live or way far away. Those 700K people will explore the middle of the country much more living there then they do currently from the coast. Branson, MO would certainly become a much bigger deal and those vacationers will want to see improved infrastructure in the places they visit. Creating a bunch of smaller blue cities inside the patchwork quilt of red is a good thing if I was god-king all of the states would have the same population density and would be balanced 33/33/33 between urban/suburban/rural.
Of course, this has very little to do with the OPs plan so I’ll end the hijack.
I think the number would be greater than just those three. But let’s put that aside.
You note that this would be a trivial expense overall and you’re right. It would be a trivial expense in the overall cost of building a new capital city.
I found an article on the cost of building a new city. It gave a low estimate of $100,000 per person (and it gave examples of the costs being as high a $1,000,000 per person). Let’s assume the federal government does a very efficient job in this massive government project (yes, I can hear you laughing) and we do it for the $100,000.
Washington exists for a reason. And people say the primary reason for the city’s existence is the federal government. So we’ll assume the new capital, which will exist for a similar reason, will be approximately the same size as the existing capital. The population of Washington, DC is a little over 700,000 (ignoring all of the suburbs). But I’ll be generous and round that down to 500,000.
Using these figures, the cost of building a new capital would be $50,000,000,000. That’s a pretty good sized expense. For that kind of money, I’d like to see more evidence that this project will solve the problem. For that kind of money, I’d like to see more evidence that a problem even exists.
Why should the capital be in the center ? See London, Paris etc.
And where should the center be if you consider Alaska, Hawaii and other overseas territories ?
The center of the 50 states including Alaska and HI is near Belle Fourche in Western South Dakota. If you were to throw in the inhabited overseas territories, you’d have PR and the USVI pushing it a bit southeast,but then you’d have Guam, the NMI and Samoa pulling it way waaay hard to WSW, you may end up off the coast of California for a point that’s equidistant from every place that has a seat in Congress.
The population center meanwhile would not be very affected by the far Pacific territories with their relatively tiny populations, and only mildly pushed east by Puerto Rico’s 3+ million.
Lincoln, Nebraska for the official capital - I think it has a nice ring.
Pierre, SD for the Pentagon and all that other stuff.
Give residential and commercial areas of DC back to the states and give the central area to the Park Service and the Smithsonian. It would be a great place to visit but nobody would live there.
