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Mar 25, 2009

Comments

KSBRunimpressed

Neil,
With more than 150K vendors to the government every year,the list you diligently illuminated, covering several years, registers in the fourth decimal place of the total population. Don't get me wrong: fraud, waste, and abuse need to be energetically rooted out wherever they can be found. But what you are doing is implying--I am sure unintentionally--that the number of miscreant-- albeit those identified and pursued--in the total population is miniscule. Maybe it is even lower than the number of rotten Congresspeople, civil servants, car dealers, clergy, doctors, lawyers, Little League players, Girl Scouts,and any other sets you choose to characterize, except, say, iBankers and other Wall Street types. Many of us wish as much as POGO that the real rate of misbehavior among government workers and government contractors were known. Unfortunately, we have little to go on, even though the "products" of government often seem, well, excessively unsatisfactory. Even when you work hard, and well, to gather and create data bases, such as your famous one on contractors, you seem to confirm the overall goodness of the general population. It might be better to be a less breathless about such findings, if you know what I mean.

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