So Slate‘s Matt Yglesias runs through all the real-life particulars of who gets hit or missed by a national plunge off the so-called “fiscal cliff,” and closes with this interesting brief observation:
This is basically bad news all around. But note that it’s especially bad news for rich people and people living in the Washington, D.C., area. You’ll probably have noticed that high-income individuals living in the D.C. area have disproportionate influence over the political press, which is one reason there’s been so much fiscal-cliff hype.
Yeah, I guess if you’re, say, a management consultant with a lot of defense industry clients married to a GS-14 and living in an expensive NoVa neighborhood, higher income tax and capital gains and dividends rates plus higher payroll taxes plus spending sequestrations plus a higher AMT look like a mighty big ball o’ pain–and perhaps subjectively even more alarming because the Emerald City has largely avoided the Great Recession. It’s a special case where the hackneyed “All politics is local” dictum may be entirely true.
