The Pork Latitudes
All this fuss and bother about spendthrift Republicans and the current blog-paign to “cut pork from the national budget” is going to go nowhere because people keep avoiding the elephant in the room. In a move to quit hiding my light under bushels on other peoples’ websites, I’m going to share with you, my readers, what I said in the comments of the post I linked above:
I know how to get government spending to drop through the floor: repeal the 19th amendment.
I’m serious. Take the vote away from women. Sure, this will bite for the minority of women who are actually politically aware and intelligent, but the majority of women’s instinctive impulse to gather and hoard is what drives the soccer mom spend-more-money-on-the-nanny-state vote, when they aren’t voting for the most spineless candidate because he looks like he wouldn’t frighten their children, or if they are single, voting for the one with the best hair. The fact that women vote has meant that most politicians now spend most of their time trying to please women, who generally don’t like things that make loud noise or smell bad — like industry and war.
Think about it, guys. Isn’t most of your spending outlay done in the cause of impressing some woman? Except for the occasional expensive male toy (a speedboat here, a sports car there), don’t most of you find contentment living simply on very little? How many women find the idea of going off into the non-electrified, non-hot-watered wilderness to camp and hunt wild animals and/or fish attractive for a rare outing, never mind at regular yearly intervals? How many women think of leftover pizza as a nutritious full-course meal? How many men buy “accessories” to “decorate” their bachelor pads — I don’t mean beer can pyramids, I mean fifteen-dollar bundles of dried reeds from the Phillipines that you can stick in a vase. How many men own a vase?
Women are the ones men buy increasingly fancy homes, with Roman tubs, “art niches,” and deco railings for. Women are the reason men buy new cars every few years — because the little woman isn’t going to endure that rattletrap with the door you have to wire shut, she doesn’t care if it’s a classic, and you can’t put a baby seat in the back of a pickup truck. Give a man a fishing pole and he’ll catch a fish for dinner. Give a woman a fishing pole and she’ll look at it, give you the fish eye, and tell you to get on the phone NOW and make reservations or you’ll never see her again. Want to stop the spending on “pork,” or as I like to call it, “accessories”? Take the vote away from women. They’ll still whine and try to influence men behind the scenes, but giving them the vote didn’t stop this behavior as was once naively thought would happen — it only increased the obnoxious sense of entitlement women already have.
Yes, I know these are generalizations, and that there are some politically savvy women out there, but I would think that they would be willing to give something valuable up for the good of their country; or else they’re no more serious than the majority of women.
THE END.
Well, we won’t do it, of course. There isn’t a man in this country with the balls to take the expensive engagement rings back from their ex-fiancées, never mind take away the vote. I mean, I am doing my part to, figuratively speaking, fling my vote back in mens’ faces; I’m even willing to scream “take this stupid old vote — I never wanted it anyway!” But I’m just one woman, and my shop-’til-you-drop sisters are legion.
Update: oh no! They got him — Iowahawk says we need to save the Iowa Rainforest. For the Children™, what else? Damn you breeders! Damn you all to hell!
At this point, all I can do is pray. Or eat Cheetos.
September 29th, 2005 at 7:29 pm
Bah, I’m of the sort that likes to think that pork-barrel spending ACTUALLY goes to secret government black-ops, Clancy-type stuff that would be reprehensible to lefties (And most anyone with empathy for their fellow man.) but MUST BE DONE TO KEEP THE WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY(tm).
Then again, I like to assume our politicians are competent at times. *Sigh*
September 29th, 2005 at 7:34 pm
Andrea,
Tell the truth. This is shameless baiting of feministe-brand trolls.
September 29th, 2005 at 8:41 pm
Come on, OHNOES, you know as well as I do that the most successful black ops are self funding. You know, the velcro and microwave patents held by MIB, the proceeds from crack sales by the CIA, the kickbacks from Halliburton to DoD.
My rule of thumb would be that any government activity that does not at least break even is bullshit touchy-feely sensitive Democratic crap that is actually a detriment to the running of out nation.
I’d be with you on repealing the 19th Amendment, Andrea, except that it was voted into law by men, which suggests that we aren’t any more canny than the other leading gender. Had I been alive and voting back then, I would have voted against and then came home and said “sorry honey, I tried but I guess there are just too many Neanderthals out there.” Don’t know why a majority of men didn’t do that.
September 29th, 2005 at 9:36 pm
Well, how would a super-covert group of mercenaries eliminating anti-American threats before they rise up and gain notoriety be self-funding? Do free-agent mercenary work in the off hours?
September 29th, 2005 at 9:37 pm
skubie, don’t forget the MiB’s Rubic’s Cube.
September 30th, 2005 at 1:54 am
I own a vase.
Admittedly it’s rectangular, full of D&D dice, and hasn’t seen a flower since the turn of the millennium, but it’s a vase for all that.
I don’t spend much money at all on impressing women, which is probably why I’m still single. (Well, that and being crotchety and anti-social…)
But yeah, a bed, a desk, a roof that doesn’t leak too much, and a dual-core Athlon with a terabyte of disk, a 19″ LCD, and unlimited broadband access, and I’m happy.
September 30th, 2005 at 2:03 am
Don’t forget that men, simple creatures, like pleasing women.
A nag, in fact, is a woman who never shows she’s satisfied with her man.
Somewhere there’s a nice James Tate poem on it that resonates with men anyway. hmm
http://eeksypeeksy.blogspot.com/2003_07_01_eeksypeeksy_archive.html scroll down to The Blue Booby.
The political dynamic is really that women don’t want to count on their man.
And probably it’s only 40% of women, but it’s a big enough voting bloc to swing every election,
and so, like the MSM audience, it’s the one that gets catered to.
September 30th, 2005 at 2:55 am
You’ll take my vote when you pry it from my cold dead hands. And yet, almost, you tempt me.
How ’bout we just take the vote away from government employees? I can always get another job…
September 30th, 2005 at 4:16 am
I think it might be a bit easier to take the vote away from people who pay no taxes. Easier to defend morally, too. But hey, any port in a storm.
September 30th, 2005 at 5:21 am
Nice site Andrea!
Yes, provocative posting, and sure to incite some to trolldom. But I know that you know what to do about that.
Hey, instant preview.
You know, this is some place you have here. Much nicer than that tenement of TB’s.
I could move right in - and you say you don’t want to vote, or modern stuff like that?
The basic problem is one of inequality. Men want it all the time and they are faced with choices. Be a bastard or be a bit of a wuss.
It is one of those balance issues. For women it can come down to being a doormat or being something of a control freak.
It is really nice when both can offer the other a nicely judged mix of giving and demanding. It is nice to be part of, nice to see, when it happens.
Unfortunately not often enough, as the divorce courts show.
As to the pork issue - probably true to say that those with the money can be tempted to waste it on frippery. Guys can be minimalist on decor and linen, but spend big time on cars, booze, entertainment and electronics.
Anyway, come up and see me some time!
September 30th, 2005 at 7:39 am
I have a better suggestion.
Institute “awareness tests” for potential voters. That way, you also weed out the slacker-men who would be inclined to vote for a guy based on how close his surname is to a favorite rock star or NASCAR driver.
If you can’t name three current cabinet members, and summarize what they are supposed to do in a sentence or three, no vote for you. If you use the awareness test as an opportunity to spout invective - regardless of whether it’s an R, a D, or an XYZ in the White House, no vote for you.
I’d also be willing to go along with raising the voting age to 30. (Then again, there are an awful lot of stooooooopid people over 30…)
September 30th, 2005 at 8:04 am
Andrea, I’ve spent the last month or so seeing a large number of lousy, naive, and stupid proposals for reducing pork being bandied about by y-chromosome-carrying folk that I doubt your suggestion would work.
Most of the waste and “pork” in the budget isn’t some bridge somewhere that got inserted at the end of a transportation bill. It’s the way that programs that we need are structured so that they’ll cost more than they have to for the amount of work that needs to be done.
Just one example off the top of my head… take, for example, defense programs such as the Stealth Bomber, the Comanche helicopter, and the Crusader self-propelled artillery piece.
In each of those, the weapons were developed, prototypes worked out, and _assembly lines built_ and then the programs cancelled. (Comanche and Crusader were cancelled, assembly lines in place, without building production units; they ran the stealth bomber assembly line at 10% of capacity (even though it apparently took a much larger percentage of the payroll to do so) for a couple years and then mothballed that factory).
You can see a parallel example in the space program: the Delta IV factory can handle a much larger number of core units than it’s currently making, but the AF is splitting their order between Delta and Atlas (which violated the spirit of the contract by using Russian parts) and NASA is going off to make their own virtually handmade launchers _especially_ for their crew transport vehicle out of shuttle SRB’s at the rate of two or three a year. Their new launcher program(s) are designed to employ the exact same people at the exact same places as the shuttle program, with actual results a distant second objective. Which means they’ll be spending about five billion dollars a year (or more) in payroll for a couple launches a year to LEO and a couple launches a year to the moon, _when_ they finally get around to launching missions on the things.
I could go on with other examples, but I need to get to work now. The point I’m trying to make is that I doubt these structural problems are caused by women voting.
September 30th, 2005 at 8:30 am
I’ve heard Neal Boortz make the same case (when I used to listen to him)…that women vote for big gov’t/socialism because they are looking for security. And while it’s not true for me, I will certainly admit it’s true for a large percentage of women. Also, there are those ditzy broads who will vote for any woman just because she’s a woman (never mind what she believes) or the cute guy they gush over like he’s a teen idol. For example, I just read the other day how Warren Beatty made a speech at a nurses association in California and the audience (which I assume had a large percentage of women) were begging him to run for governor.
I don’t think women should lose their right to vote. I think that many (most?) women are just really immature voters. I mean, women have been voting for less than a century. And I believe the percentage for sensible women voters has increased steadily over the years. I guess what I’m saying is, give us some time.
Incidentally, didn’t the whole issue driving giving women the right the vote have to do with the temperance movement? And as soon as women got the right to vote, Prohibition was voted in (because the women’s movement at that time blamed alcohol for domestic violence and loutish men who didn’t take care of their families).
As far as the way men and women spend, I know you were talking generalities, but I happened to grow up in one of those outlier families where everything was reversed. My Dad was the spender, and it was for things he wanted…for his various hobbies and such. My Mom was the thrifty one.
September 30th, 2005 at 8:38 am
Hmmm…
Women: want Warren Beatty to run for President.
Men: spend oceans of money on large metal objects then forget about them and leave them lying around gathering dust.
I’ve got it… cancel democracy!
At least under an absolute monarchy all of that wastage of cash will go to cool things like extravagant castles and waging war on foreigners becasue they looked at us funny.
September 30th, 2005 at 2:13 pm
The number of women I impress can be counted on the fingers of no hands; I have budgeted accordingly.
September 30th, 2005 at 3:09 pm
Repealing the 19th Amendment is a subject that people have thought about before (there’s a petition that dates from 1988).
Government spending and its relation to extensions of the voting franchise has also been studied. I have some references in this article, including a pointer to Lott and Kenny’s paper “Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?”
I didn’t discuss repealing the 19th Amendment, but I do have to wonder what things would look like had it never been passed. I suspect that we’ll never repeal it now - I’m unaware of any group that has been granted the franchise ever having it removed by a democratic process.
October 1st, 2005 at 12:55 am
Forget the 19th Amendment: if we’re going through the Constitution with the red pen with the specific purpose of trying to restrain government spending, let’s repeal the 16th Amendment.
October 2nd, 2005 at 4:32 pm
Ms. Harris is correct. Women tend to be sentimentalists. Making them voters (or jurors) was for that reason imprudent.
Of course, sentimentalism isn’t the only thing that makes a voter bad. Plain old stupidity is bad, but there seems in that to be little to choose between men and women. I cannot myself think of an offsetting disability so that women can symmetrically disparage the voting of men–at least, not one that is true.
A moral (as opposed to consequential) argument can be made for women voting anyway, on the widely believed grounds that there are some things good for women as a whole that are bad for men as a whole, or vice versa. But I don’t belive that there are; do you?
My personal favorite amendment to repeal would be the 17th, without (and before) which federal encroachments on state authority–now at least 99% of federal domestic activity–would never get through the Senate.
October 2nd, 2005 at 4:38 pm
Men are just as sentimental as women; they just tend to wax lugubrious and teary over different things. The truth is, on emotional grounds most men can’t be trusted with the vote either.