In a blog post last week, I wrote that "no politician worth their salt will support a massive progressive tax increase to pay off all the debt generated by the war." We here at OMB Watch believe in holding people accountable, so here goes: I was wrong. Rep. James McGovern (D-MA) has basically done just that, and he is a politician "worth his salt" (full disclosure: he's the co-chair of the board of the Congressional Hunger Center, which runs an amazing fellowship that first got me to Washington). He writes in the Boston Globe today:

U.S. PIRG released a new report today that profiles how contractors who have poor performance or fraudulent practices can still receive new contracts from the federal government. The report profiles companies such as Bank of America, General Electric, Lexis-Nexis, Kellogg, Brown, and Root, and Northrup Grumman, among others. An excerpt from the report's executive summary: The rapid increase of federally contracted dollars—100 percent since 2000—makes outsourcing the fastest growing component of discretionary spending. The government's preference for using outside contractors to provide goods and services makes careful scrutiny of the process and the decisions more important than in the past. At present, loose rules, lack of competition, and limited accountability permit so-called 'bad actors' to receive contracts that put taxpayers and our money at risk. It's a very interesting report and I'm sure, as they imply, these examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Also of note, they use FedSpending.org for their contracts data - very cool! U.S. PIRG: Forgiving Fraud and Failure: Profiles in Federal Contracting

This week's Samuelson Watch is outsourced to Matthew Yglesias:

via CQ($): Responding to Congressional appropriators' suggestion that an income tax surcharge might be used to pay for future operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a livid House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) played the "partisan" card to avoid making fiscally responsible decisions about war spending. Raiding every taxpayer's wallet for the purposes of playing politics with our national security amounts to some of the most irresponsible public policy I've seen in a long, long time.