Tag: federal spending

Leftist Lexicon Word of the Week

Scandal and politics go hand in hand like Dylan Mulvaney and the world’s worst Audrey Hepburn from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” impersonator. Some, like the Somali fraud in Minnesota, are pretty substantial. Others…well, let’s just say they’re fucking stupid and should be mocked.

This week, Secretary of War (because Secretary of Killing the Enemy and Breaking Their Shit was too long to put on a t-shirt) Pete Hegseth found himself at the center of a controversy over…and I wish I were making this up…surf and turf. Seems Pete’s been going on a spending spree to the tune of $93.4 billion, including $15.1 million on ribeyes, $2 million on Alaskan king crab, over $7.4 million a month on lobster tails, and other items ranging from Apple products to a piano.

Now, Leftists who normally wouldn’t give one-one-millionth of a shit about spending are up in arms about it! Of course, the usual suspects like Senator Adam “I’m the Love Child of a Human Woman and a Galapagos Tortoise” Schiff, Jasmine “Stacey Abrams 2.0” Crockett, and Adam “Temu Adam Schiff” Kinzinger rushed to social media to lambast the spending, calling it a waste of taxpayer funds from the Administration that gave us DOGE.

Guess which kind of scandal I’m putting Lobstergate in.

Lobstergate

What the Left thinks it means – a waste of money for extravagant luxury items

What it really means – an opportunity for the Left to take all the seats

When it comes to government spending, I’m very much like my idol and spirit animal Ron Swanson. Government is too damn big, so trimming the fat with a chainsaw seems like a good first step. Naturally, when I saw the price tag and what the money was being spent on, my first instinct was to complain. Then, my second instinct was to take a whiz because I had drunk a lot of adult beverages just an hour before.

Eventually, though, the rational side of my mind (or at least the side that can at least appear rational to the untrained eye) started looking into the specifics. I started with the steak because, well, steak. In September 2025, the Department of War spent $22 million on steak and lobster, which makes for one hell of a cookout.

Now, those who know a thing or two about financial matters might take note of the month where this money was spent. For those of you who don’t (or who are Leftists, which is pretty much the same thing), September marks the end of the fiscal year, which in government circles means spend as much as you can even if you’re not going to lose it if it isn’t spent. That adds some perspective to the Leftists’ bullshit.

And, as the MAGA Right will tell you, the steak and lobster didn’t go to Pistol-Packin’-Pete. It was given to…our military, as it has been done repeatedly in the past. Given the state of MREs (famously called Meals Refused by Ethiopians per the late great P. J. O’Rourke), I can excuse splurging on surf and turf because a famous man once said, “an army travels on its belly.”

And that man? You guessed it, Frank Stallone.

Aside from the steak and seafood, something else that caught my eye was the $98,329 grand piano. And that’s not all! Once you drill down to some of the more…bizarre expenditures, it gets harder and harder to justify.

Welcome to government accounting 101, where the budgets are made up and fiscal responsibility doesn’t matter.

And before you go off saying this reporting is from a Soros-funded think tank, I decided to take a closer look at the organization that reported on the extravagant spending under Hegseth’s watch, a little group the kids like to call Open the Books. To put it simply, they were DOGE before DOGE was a thing. Unless Uncle George has gone into funding fiscal conservative groups (which given what bullshit he’s thrown his money towards is highly unlikely), these are some of the “good guys.”

I’ve long been a proponent of reining in excessive and stupid spending, and Lobstergate has a mix of understandable yet excessive spending and drunken sailors on shore leave have more fiscal restraint spending. This is the nature of federal government for most of my life: spend now, figure it out later. Regardless of which major party holds the purse strings, we constantly find out about expensive toilet seats and promoting pineapple juice, but we never do anything about it as voters. Even when politicians tell us they want to cut spending, it never fucking happens.

A big part of this is the “spend it or lose it” mentality within the government. In order to justify spending more next year, bureaucrats and politicians find ways to spend money before the end of the fiscal year showing they really need all that extra money next year. After all, we can’t expect our fighting men and women to be at their best if we don’t spend billions of dollars on furniture, can we?

Actually, I’m pretty sure we can. Last time I checked, a credenza can’t shoot worth a shit. Maybe it’s because, well, it’s a piece of fucking furniture.

One of the things I will always go on record in criticizing with the Trump Administration is the number of unforced errors they make on the regular. This is one of them. And, yes, I know it’s business as usual in DC, but from the jump the current Trump Administration focused on cutting waste. Lobstergate doesn’t help that image and makes the President seem as two-faced as the Swamp creatures he ran against.

This almost gives the Left a W here. I say almost because they’re not much better at fiscal responsibility as Republicans have been in recent decades. In no way does it excuse the Right, but it puts their critiques into context. They’re just anti-Trump at this point, so even if he does something they approved in the past, it’s horrible.

Yeah, you’re not beating the charges of being flaming hypocrites anytime soon, kids.

And you should really take a seat. In fact, take all the seats. After the Obamacare debacle, you should never be considered credible by anyone with two working brain cells. I mean, you guys kept parroting Paul Krugman’s bullshit and he’s as reliable as Miss Cleo hooked up to a lie detector. You’re just not good at economics, and it shows.

Meanwhile, Lobstergate is more about government spending than it is about the Left/Right debate, mainly because both sides are horrible at staying within a budget, or passing one for that matter. The national debt is an ongoing concern, and reckless spending on last minute items isn’t the way to address it. Just ask anyone who racks up a huge credit card bill over the holidays.

Instead, let me propose an idea that’s worked everywhere it’s been tried: if you don’t need it, don’t spend money on it. Sure, you may lose money next fiscal year because you didn’t use up everything you received this year, but when the national debt is higher than Hunter Biden at Crack-A-Palooza, it’s more important to make the money stretch farther than to secure more money for grand pianos and Sesame Street in Iraq.

Trust the free market on this, kids. If there’s a need, it will be filled as soon as someone finds a way to make money off it. And I’m not talking Congresscritters here. If there is a demand for a good or service, government doesn’t have to step in and fill it; a smart businessperson will step up and do it. Then, he or she will have to pay taxes on that investment, so you’ll get your money, just not deposited directly into your pockets like you normally get it. Government intervention in creating demand never works out well in the end, especially when you consider most politicians and bureaucrats wouldn’t know a ROI from a DUI.

The difference? Government types get a lot more of the latter on our tax dollars than they do the former.











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Something About Everything
Something About Everything
@somethingabouteverything

a Blog about Faith, Politics, Technology, and everything.

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Leftist Lexicon Word of the Week

You may not have known this, but we were on the brink of disaster on October 1st. While most people’s minds are focused on Halloween, which is a holiday where scary fun can be had by all. But Leftists focused on this recent scary date where the government could have shut down. To a Leftist, that concept is scarier than every “Saw” movie combined.

When there’s even a hint of a government shutdown, Leftists lose their minds and start coming up with all sorts of doomsday scenarios. Our military will be scaled back, leaving us defenseless. Old people won’t get their monthly checks, causing them to starve and die. Worst of all, though…”The View” might get renewed for another season!

But if it weren’t for the actions of some plucky political officials, we would be running around with pollution everywhere, cities on fire, and utter chaos. In other words, San Francisco on any given day.

Since the can got kicked down the road until mid-November, we have some time to relax and think more about what a government shutdown actually means.

government shutdown

What the Left thinks it means – holding the country hostage fiscally so a group of right wing extremists get what they want

What it really means – an exercise showing how bloated the federal government has gotten and what can/should be cut without affecting our everyday lives

In the interests of transparency, I am a small government advocate. I know! Shocking, isn’t it? The reason for my position is pretty simple: a smaller government is an accountable government. Right now, Congresscritters can pass whatever bills they want so full of pork both the B’nai B’rith and Muslim organizations reject it on religious grounds. Try pulling that shit when the only thing between you and an angry mob is a receptionist’s desk.

Since I seem to be in the minority on this, I’ve come to understand why some people want a larger government. I don’t like it, but I understand it. And it really comes down to one thing: people today want to be ruled rather than governed. It’s easier to let someone else tackle the big stuff so we can go back to obsessing about pumpkin spice this and TikTok that and celebrity gossip the other thing. Keeping informed is just too hard, guys! And it’s boring! So, why not just let the government run everything so we can focus on the really important stuff?

Because, ladies and gentlemen, we’re being run by powerful idiots who make bad decisions on the regular. Like not having an actual budget for, oh, decades now. That’s right! Our federal government has not passed a budget since 1996. The way we’ve kept the lights on in Washington, DC, has been through either Continuing Resolutions (basically a legislative method to kick the can down the road in the hopes someone else will pass a budget) or through omnibus spending bills (basically a legislative method to kick the can down the road in the hopes someone else will pick up the tab for their expenditures).

In short, we’re fucked. And neither the Left nor the Right have any plans to unfuck us. But only one side really goes out of its way to turn their collective fiscal irresponsibility into a horror show where everyone is a victim. I’ll give you three guesses, and all three are “Leftists.”

See, Leftists have this unshakable faith in the government as the source of all good in the world. If the government doesn’t do a particular task, Leftists will find a way to wedge the government in there, which creates layer upon layer of bureaucracy. And over time, that bureaucracy grows and becomes more essential to the task until the two are permanently stuck together like my fingers when I try to use Crazy Glue.

And with that Amazing Colossal Bureaucracy comes job opportunities for Leftists, as well as money from said government drones and power over the rest of us. So, when there’s the threat of the government shutting down, it starves the bureaucracy and curtails the power it wields. To the Left, that’s the worst possible thing that could happen. To me, it’s threatening me with a good time.

It should be pointed out government shutdowns have become a political football for the Left and the Right for the past several years. Of these, 13 occurred under a Republican President, while the remaining 8 happened with a Democrat in the White House. Although both major parties shared the blame early on, Republicans took the majority of the blame for the more recent shutdowns because, well, the Left told us they were to blame and enough people believed them.

And because they were right, even if only half so. Both parties are to blame for not being able to pay the country’s bills, mainly because they’re the ones running up the budget to pay for things like non-existent aircraft, wrenches and toilet seats that cost more than the GDP of most of Africa, and really stupid expenditures.

Like more money going to Ukraine.

Yes, kids, the House Democrats weren’t willing to bend much on sending more money to a country we’re supporting in a war between two countries where their leaders are corrupt, dishonest men. Meanwhile, House Republicans wanted money to go towards disaster relief because, as the residents of East Palestine and Maui will tell you, the Puddin’ Head Joe Administration hasn’t done jack shit to help them.

Whenever government shutdowns loom larger than Michael Moore’s shadow, both sides always call for “clean bills,” which is a euphemism for “a bill that pays for everything we want while fucking over the other side.” Between that and the complaints about how many pages the proposed spending bill is, it’s amazing anything gets done at all because both sides would rather play chicken with our tax dollars than come up with an actual budget to constrain costs as much as any federal budget can.

But in the end, both sides know a government shutdown is more theatrical than fiscal. The Left will run sob story after sob story about some lower level drone who won’t get paid and, thus, will go hungry. The Right will complain about how little was cut, but how they had to surrender like the French when there was a minute amount of pushback from the Left.

And the rest of us go on living life as normal for the most part. I’ve been alive for each of the government shutdowns I mentioned above, and not once have the doomsday scenarios painted by the Left ever happened. Even the longer ones didn’t affect most people.

That’s one of the dirty secrets of government shutdowns: the programs the Left always paint as being on the verge of collapse due to the shutdown are usually scheduled to be paid without interruption. And the government employees who lose their jobs when there’s a shutdown? They still get paid after the fact.

Which means…it’s all a show that we’re paying for, but not really enjoying. So, like “Two and a Half Men” on demand, only without the demand part.

The thing to remember whenever a government shutdown is threatened is most people know how to get by even better without the government than they do with it. This may be my small government bias talking (or just common sense), but the fact we don’t need much government should tell both sides maybe we don’t need to spend so much on their services. But that would mean they would have to willingly give up the money and power they get by having the government’s tentacles in every aspect of our lives, sometimes several times over.

Anything short of a full scale fire-and-rehire movement on Capitol Hill won’t prevent a government shutdown going forward. However, I do have a way for us to save some money doing something both sides like to do, but don’t like to admit.

That’s right. Outsourcing Congress to India.

At this point, anything’s worth a shot.