Give the Boys the Boot
It’s the end of the year and everyone seems to be worried about spending – especially the government. Well, I’ve got a solution for our overspending, at least for the military. Turn the Pentagon budget over to women.
Yes; we are the ones who know how to shop, how to find a bargain, how to hunt for the best prices. A $250 hammer? Really? I got a whole set of great screwdrivers from Big Lots for about $10. Just imagine what I could do with $533.8 billion.
If you think that’s too much to ask, then just give us the $140.4 billion procurement budget. Do you really think we can’t do better than a bunch of men when it comes to things like food? Who in their right mind leaves the grocery shopping to a man? Sure, we’ll let them go pick up bread and milk and eggs, but meat and condiments? How many refrigerators are filled with gherkins and cocktail onions because they trusted a man?
And it’s not just food. It doesn’t matter if you’ve bought Scott toilet paper for 25 years; they’ll come home with Charmin Extra Soft – which, by the way, has about half as much on the roll and will require you to replace it all that more often.
And don’t even get me started on the uniforms. Didn’t they ever hear of Marshalls or TJ Maxx?
So I say, bring it on: give us a free hand with those billions and in no time at all, we’ll have that Pentagon budget down by about half. Just enough so we can pay our service people what they deserve.
Tags: budget, deficit, government spending, grocery shopping, military, pentagon
Depends on what we’re shopping for, I guess. Men might be better, in fact, at shopping for electronics than most women, whereas women are probably better at shopping for clothes, in general. .
Not a bad idea. If Lucille procures the shoes for the soldiers, they will all have fifty pair each…
Unfortunately, it is not that simple. I work at the Pentagon, spending the taxpayers dollars and my field, Contracting, is already dominated by women. In fact, the head of the Army Materiel Command (AMC) is a female 4 star General, GEN Anne Dunwoody. AMC is the agency in charge of purchasing all goods and services for the US Army. So, this is not one that you can blame on the boys…and you know Lucille, that you and I are on the same page, politically 🙂
Sure, but who makes the budget number decisions? After all, if you GIVE us all the money in the world to spend, we will. But I say if you put one of us at the top – the tippy top – we could find some real bargains!
And, I misspoke: it was a $436 hammer as well as a $640 toilet seat. We couldn’t do better?
The $250 hammer myth rises from the dead again. Was it really a $450 hammer? How about $600? $500? Everybody has a different figure for the cost of the hammer. It was costed out at $450, but that’s not the whole story. Check this out: http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1298/120798t1.htm
Like most stories about “Government Waste”, a phenomenon that does exist, this example was “dumbed down” by our “explicators” in the media so that average yokels like you and me would watch deodorant commercials on T.V., cut down another lonesome pine for the priviledge of believing we knew the “truth” from the New York Times, or promoted by politicians like Al Gore who wanted to gut the Pentagon budget with his “Golden Hammer” Awards. Always check your sources at the door.
Is my incredible wit lost on everyone? Hasn’t anyone heard of satire?
Lucille I thought that you comments were brilliant. I thought that the comments you got back were very interesting. Not what I expected to see.
Men ARE better shoppers. We know what we want. Go in to the store to get it. Get out of the store and parking lot, and make way for a Woman, who wants to hold a parking spot All Day, Shop for things that she didn’t know she wanted… go back to that store, because it was the right color after all… laateedaa laateedaa…till infinity. The Men know what I mean.