CNS’ Jeffrey Regularly Bashes Wealthy D.C. Suburbs (Where He Lives And Works)

In what has basically become close to a yearly ritual, CNSNews.com editor Terry Jeffrey cites census data to attack the Washington, D.C., suburbs as 1) having too many wealthy people who 2) work for the government. We could see this way back in a 2014 column:

Those who live in this nation’s richest county and those who live in its poorest have an important thing in common: a disproportionate dependence on government.

[…]

The independent City of Falls Church, Va. — which the Census Bureau treats as a county — was the nation’s wealthiest. Its median household income was $121,250. Wilcox County, Ala., was the poorest. Its median household income was $22,126. 

[…]

In both places, government employed people out of proportion to the national rate of 14.9 percent. In Falls Church, a suburb less than 10 miles south of Washington, D.C., 31.3 percent of the people with jobs worked for government. In Wilcox County, it was 25.4 percent.

Jeffrey’s absurd comparison of a suburban city near the seat of government with a poor, rural Alabama county led up to an attack on “government investment in education and social welfare programs” promoted by liberals because Wilcox County is still poor. His solution: “Give every child in Wilcox County — and in every other American jurisdiction — a voucher worth as much as it costs to send a child to public school. Let parents, if they wish, send their children to private and religious schools, where they reinforce, rather than seek to replace, the family.”

Just one problem with that: According to Wikipedia, the only private school in majority-black Wilcox County is a “segregation academy” — that is, a school founded to serve white students after public schools were desegregated. So vouchers are not exactly the solution here.

Jeffrey continued to attack the wealth of the Washington suburbs on a nearly annual basis every time new census data came out, even though he admitted in that 2014 article that he lives near Falls Church (though he didn’t admit that his office at the Media Research Center headquarters is also well in the D.C. suburbs as well):

• 2016: Census Bureau: 4 Richest Counties in U.S. Are Suburbs of D.C.
• 2017: Census Bureau: D.C. Suburbs Remain Nation’s Richest Counties
• 2017: Census Bureau: 5 Richest Counties Are D.C. Suburbs
• 2018: Census Bureau: 5 Richest U.S. Counties Are D.C. Suburbs; 10 of Nation’s 20 Richest Counties in D.C. Area
• 2019: 9 of 20 Richest Counties Are D.C. Suburbs; Virginia Suburbs Beat Silicon Valley

Jeffrey did change things up a bit in 2020, writing an article claiming that “Twenty-six of the 27 richest congressional districts in the United States … are currently represented by Democrats,” and that “every one of the nation’s seventeen richest congressional districts, when measured by median household income as of 2019, are currently represented by Democrats.”

After taking a couple years off, a Jan. 12 article by Jeffrey added San Francisco suburbs to his richest-county attack in an apparent swipe at Nancy Pelosi: 

The eight richest counties in the United States in 2020, when measured by median household income, were all suburbs of Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, Calif., according to data released by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Five were in the Washington area and three were in the San Francisco area.

While this may all be factually accurate, Jeffrey is cherry-picking data to make a political attack. That kind of bias, sadly, is exactly what we expect from CNS.