Congress prohibits the District from taxing commuters, an important source of revenue for most major northeastern cities. The city must provide expensive services, including Medicaid, mental health, drug treatment and prisons, that are typically underwritten by state and county governments. A congressional subcommittee recently moved to address some of those inequities, proposing to transfer the prisons to federal control and assume the cost of pensions incurred during the days of federal control of the city. It's unworkable for anybody. Given the imbalance, we have done a remarkable job of living within our means.
Few analysts are so sanguine.
Several suggest that federal spending has a tranquilizing effect on Washington. They say that city officials, fiscally secure for more than two centuries in their federal cocoon, rarely pursue manufacturing and small businesses with as much vigor as other cities do. In D.C., they haven't reached that point.