The richest counties in America are in the suburbs around Washington D.C., which has the liberals at the Washington Post feeling guilty about our success. And of course its all Bush's fault.

That accumulation of suburban wealth, local economists said, is a side effect of the enormous flow of federal money into the region through contracts for defense and homeland security work in the five years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, coming after the local technology boom of the 1990s.

Local or not, any economist who talks about the accumulation of wealth needs to be kicked in the nuts. Wealth doesn't accumulate like fallen snow. It's the created as the fruits of our labor.

And why are defense and homeland security contracts to blame? What about other local agencies such as the IRS, EPA, or Patent Office? I thought all that defense money was being funneled back to Bush and Cheney's Halliburton cronies in Texas.

The Post laments the area's prosperity as if it's a bad thing. Its true that there is a lot of opportunity here because of the federal bureaucracy. But anyone who wants to take advantage of it needs only to move here and find a job. That's what I did and I'm better off for it.

Of course the Post doesn't believe in freedom of choice. They think its the governments job to spread wealth and affluence around to the masses. And of course you can't talk about affluence and liberal guilt without mentioning the millions of people who choose to live without health care.

Republicans were silent about the health insurance figures, which show that the number of Americans without coverage rose to an all-time high of 46.6 million. The proportion of the population that is uninsured increased from 15.6 percent in 2004 to 15.9 percent last year. That erosion stemmed partly from a continuing decline in the number of people who get insurance through their jobs. And for the first time in recent years, government health programs, such as Medicaid and Medicare, stopped growing.

Health care is not a right. It's a service offered by doctors. You can either choose to pay the doctor directly, or purchase insurance to cover any unforeseen doctor bills that may be coming your way in the future. Either way, it's still a consumer choice.