In an earlier post, I wrote about a number of places across the United States where people were suffering economically and asked where their bailout was. It's not just that the people in these places suffer. They suffer while others flourish. And nobody flourishes more than the Village. The top three richest counties in the country are outside Washington, D.C., and D.C. suburbs account for five of the top ten and nine of the top twenty.

As a reminder, the county with the lowest median income in the United States is Kalawao County, Hawaii. It had a median household income of $9,333.

Here are the top three counties in the United States, all D.C. suburbs:

Fairfax County, Virginia, median household income of $100,318, more than ten times that of Kalawao, Hawaii.

Louden County, Virginia, median household income of $99,371.

Howard County, Maryland, median household income of $94,260.

So if it seems like the Village lives in a different world than most Americans, it's because they do. They live in a much richer one.

NOTE - The data for Kalawao County, Hawaii comes from the 2000 census and the richest counties data comes from 2006. But I'm guessing the gap didn't narrow in those six years.

NOTE 2 - One of the really interesting things in comparing richest/poorest counties is how split the nation is. Eighteen states account for the 100 poorest counties. Eighteen states do not have any counties among the 100 richest counties. There is, as you might expect, significant overlap. These states have counties among the poorest, but none among the richest: Kentucky, West Virginia, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Hawaii.

One of the things that strikes me when I look at all of the data is that many of the poorest communities have been poor for most of American history. Whites in Appalachia, African Americans in the South, Native Americans driven to reservations, and Hispanics along the border. It's depressing to think that these folks have been relatively isolated geographically along ethnic/racial lines and poor for generations (my suspicion is that statistics for city neighborhoods would be similar). While there is poverty everywhere, these areas serve as a reminder that many parts of the country didn't just suffer an economic downturn, they suffer from history, betraying the idea that in America the only thing that matters is individual accomplishment.