Your Tax Dollars at Work

President Obama says that we are a  "generous and compassionate" country and that "through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves." And to fulfill that "progressive vision," he's going to work on "making government smarter, and leaner and more effective. "

Today, under the rubric "Breakaway Wealth/Reaping Riches from Federal Spending," the Washington Post gives us a front-page picture of where a lot of those generous and compassionate federal dollars actually go:

Millions of dollars worth of federal contracts transformed Anita Talwar from a government accounting clerk into a wealthy woman—one who can afford a $2.8 million home in the Washington suburbs with its own elevator, wine cellar and Swarovski crystal chandeliers.

Talwar, a 59-year-old immigrant from India, had no idea that she and her husband would amass a small fortune when she launched a company providing tech support to the federal government in 1987. But she shrewdly took advantage of programs for minority-owned small businesses and rode a boom in federal contracting.

By the time Talwar sold Advanced Management Technology in 2004, it had grown from a one-woman shop to a company with more than 350 employees and $100 million in annual revenue—all of it from government contracts.

Talwar’s success—and that of hundreds of other contractors like her—is a key factor driving the explosion of the region’s wealth over the last two decades. It also has exacerbated the gap between high- and low-wage workers, which is wider in the D.C. area than almost anywhere else in the United States.

Washingtonians now enjoy the highest median household income of any metropolitan area in the country...

More than $80 billion in federal contracting dollars will flow to the region this year, up from $4.2 billion in 1980.

That's my kind of smart, lean, and effective government!