You couldn’t tell by the business-as-usual happenings on Capitol Hill these days. Democrats won a majority by promising to clean up the mess in Congress, but it’s hard to find much that has changed, especially in the area of honesty about federal spending.

Consider Section 511, an obscure little provision sneaked into law at the last minute by the outgoing GOP majority last year at the suggestion of the Joint Committee on Taxation. Congress needed an additional $7 billion in revenue for budget purposes. Somebody at JCT said “have county governments withhold three percent on their payment whenever a local bureaucrat buys a screwdriver or a load of concrete.” The Internal Revenue Service is already supposed to collect such a tax from businesses selling to local governments, but has botched the job, for whatever reason. The idea was adopted because JCT estimated it would generate the needed $7 billion, which was then counted toward the current budget, even though counties weren’t required to start collecting the tax until 2011.