THE LOW POST: Your Tax Dollars at Work

Chambliss' amendment passed 70-28, with wide bipartisan support. Most all of the senators who voted for the bill, including Democrats like Joe Lieberman, Chuck Schumer and Daniel Inouye, had received generous campaign contributions from Lockheed Martin, the maker of the F-22, and from subcontractors like Pratt and Whitney.

Moreover, it subsequently came out that Blair himself sat on the board of EDO, a subcontractor on the F-22 project. EDO makes a missile launching system for the plane. Though such conflicts of interest are not barred by the Pentagon, Blair last week resigned voluntarily -- quietly, with only the Post noticing, at a time when Katie Couric was neatly innovating the network news concept by giving platform-impoverished radio jock Rush Limbaugh a guest slot on her news show. Blair's resignation was a de facto admission that a key study supporting one of the largest defense procurements in history was seriously compromised, even beyond the built-in conflict of interest inherent in a Congress heavily funded by defense contractors.

The ongoing bureaucratic drama surrounding procurement for this project is a kind of fairy tale for the system of legalized corruption in this country, in which taxpayer money is basically stolen and shot into space by an open conspiracy of legislators, defense contractors and Pentagon officials, colloquially known as the "Iron Triangle." The F-22 project is particularly offensive since its cost -- $65 billion -- mirrors very closely the $50 billion in "emergency" cuts to social programs Congress made last year, ostensibly to help pay for Katrina reconstruction.

Many of those post-Katrina cuts are just beginning to hit communities around the country now. The state of Texas, for instance, recently announced that it may have to lay off as many as 1,750 employees because of federal budget cuts for various social programs. I was in Congress last year when both the House and the Senate voted to slash funding for child support collection in response to the Katrina disaster; a year later, a state like Texas will be laying off as many as two-thirds of the employees in its child-support division.

So what programs was Congress protecting, when it decided last year to take money away from single mothers, teachers, Medicaid and student loans? Ladies and gentlemen, we give you . . . the Raptor.

The F-22 is a symbol of everything that is wrong and stupid and corrupt about the United States government. Often called "the Maserati of fighter planes," the successor aircraft to the F-15 is a defense contractor's wet dream, a preposterously expensive and extravagantly useless hunk of hi-tech metal rigged with every conceivable luxury bell and whistle, a plane whose brochure comes riddled with the kind of hot and steamy selling points that pitches tents in industrial parks all over the country -- Mach 2 cruising speed, stealth skin, the most advanced avionics and software package ever invented.

But there are three basic problems with the F-22.