Your hard-earned money at work.

First of all, yes, I realize that anything less than a billion dollars is pretty much meaningless in terms of total spending.

However, I cannot help but be mildly surprised at the level of stupidity of some of the things our money is being spent on, like, oh, spending $880,000 to study snail sex.  As with many of my posts, this represents a larger issue, but first, I want to emphasize something.

They just spent well over 16 times the average household income to study why the New Zealand mud snail has sex instead of reproducing asexually.  Not only will this provide no actual benefit whatsoever to any human being in existence, nobody actually cares.  I'd be willing to bet that until this post, you'd never heard of the New Zealand mud snail.

Now, the bigger issue.  Remember my last post, about the Congressman who thought he was above everyone?  I mentioned in that post that because of their superiority complex, our governing officials don't actually care what we think.  Because of this, they gleefully throw money around like a drunken 18th century pirate on shore leave - the spending is unproductive, expensive, and frivolous, and it's not actually their money that they're spending.

See, this is just further evidence that they don't care.  They're not willing to sift through bills and take out unnecessary spending; the government happily gives scientists grants without regard to the merit of the study in question.

Our government, in short, feels that it is completely justified in spending however much money it wants on whatever it so chooses, ignoring public opinion, common sense, and fiscal responsibility - and again, ignoring the Constitution.

Finally, I must end on this sentiment.  Why do we need to know why New Zealand mud snails have sex?!