FriMday and Potpourri

This Thursday is Veteran's Day -- to all those who have ever served, happy day and thanks for what you've done. Veteran's Day in its most non-veteran sense, however, is a  day off. And it's a Thursday off. Which means you've got to go back to work on Friday. So, do you have two Fridays that week ... or two Mondays?  Whichever you choose, I vote that we call a Friday at work after a Thursday off FriMday.

Obviously I'm not going to get into the budget thing yet - probably not until the new year - but on the way home tonight I heard a story on NPR that bears thinking about. Recently, the Brazilian government threatened taxing a bunch of American goods because of our policy to provide American cotton farmers subsidies. So at this point, we have a couple options. Under World Trade Organization rules, the subsidies are probably illegal - so we could, I don't know ... stop paying US cotton farmers the subsidies.

But wait! There is another option. Instead, with all the shrewdness of a trailer park lottery winner, we offer to pay Brazillian farmers $175 MILLION dollars a year to let it go. Not being stupid, the Brazillians say, OK. Thanks for the cash.

This is sad in a number of ways. 1. Instead of saving some of our money by getting rid of subsidies, the US government has now taken another $175 Mil of our tax dollars and given them away to a foreign power.  and 2. It shows that our negotiators are, let's face it, stupid. The Brazillians thought they'd be getting a token amount of money - and then what did they get the first month? $12.5 million bucks. WHOA! they said (although with a Portuguese inflection). That's a lot of money!

What this tells me is that we didn't really 'bargain' in any meaningful sense. Hell, we probably could have gotten away with paying them $25mil a year, but instead we just gave away the (cotton) farm.

It's irritating beyond words really, how easily bureaucrats throw away our money.

If you know of an easy way for the government to save money, by all means leave a comment. I'm looking for realistic, reasonable ways too - not something silly like "get rid of the Navy". I'm really looking to compile a list of comparatively 'small' savings such as getting rid of the penny ($50Million) and the like - to prove that a few million here and a few million there and pretty soon we're talking about real money. Let's have your ideas.