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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2007-07-27

I Understand Pork Spending 

Married men, you know this phenomenon (doot dooooh, da dooh doo!)

You're on your way home from dinner with the family, and your wife reminds you that there's a couple things you need from Wal-Mart.

That's it: just two or three, specific, distinct items.

And yet, once you allow the rest of the carload to come in the store (because they need to "stretch their legs"), two items get a little lost in the process.

And it's not that it's all frivolous or goofy stuff--there's many things that are necessary and needed, and the wife is much better at remembering those things than I am.

But then one of the kids, whose buying a gift or a friend's birthday this weekend, sees something she really wants; then the wife reminds you how she's been really helpful around the house lately; and then another kid thinks "if one, than me too", and the cart gets fuller.

And then there's the "I don't really know what she wants for her birthday" which costs you 25 minutes.

And, as you go to the checkout stand, you look at everything in the cart, you know why it's in the cart, you can even tell yourself how important it was, though you can't, for the life of you, imagine where the last 90 minutes went.

And then it ocurred to me that this is EXACTLY the process Congress must go through. It takes too long, you end up with a lot more than you intended to, and you can find a hundred justifications or all of it.

So, as much as I want to be outraged at appropriations bills that vastly exceed what the President originally submits, I can understand Congress' impulses.

They're just like my 6-year old spending somebody else's money.
Posted by: Michael / 7/27/2007 11:57:00 PM

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