When they aren’t busy cybering with their pages or debating where eagles come from, Congressmen and women truly focus on what they do best: wasting your hard-earned tax money. Pork takes many forms, from the ridiculous appropriations for obscure museums to infamous ‘bridges to nowhere,’ but sometimes Congress decides to be a bit, shall we say, optimistic. For example, this year’s defense budget includes a $20 million allocation for “commemoration of success” in Iraq and Afghanistan, two countries unlikely to be partying in fiscal year 2007.

Technically, the victory party money was passed as part of the Defense Department’s 2006 budget. The Associated Press reports – with a surprisingly dry wit – that the money went “unspent.”

Overall, America spends $532 billion on defense, a staggering figure to imagine. In fact, by some calculations, the United States will soon spend more on its military than every other nation on Earth combined, a situation that has never occurred in human history. Little consolation for the 160,000 soldiers currently fighting for their lives in the desert or the millions of causes that go underfunded here in the States.

In completely unrelated news, the National Park Service budget was cut by $20 million.

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This entry was posted by Jeffrey Goodman on Thursday, October 5th, 2006 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Social Change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.