Strip Clubs, Dumb Weapons, Dumber Repugs and a Smart Budget Idea

So two weeks ago Kirsten Boyd Johnson at Wonkette came up with a brilliant federal budget idea that was inexplicably left out of President Obama's FY2013 budget.

Oh how thoughtful, House Republicans are bringing to the floor today a bill to close some kind of sexy-sounding “strip-club loophole” in what, campaign spending disclosure rules or something? No? NO. Oh right, it’s a bill meant to stop all the silly misbehaving poors from spending their welfare money at strip clubs. No wonder they aren’t out getting jobs! Please, bill sponsor Rep. Charles Boustany Jr., tell us more about this terrifying epidemic of taxpayer waste!

From The Hill:

“It’s pretty rampant around the country,” Boustany said of the abuses. “This has really eroded the credibility of the TANF program in the eyes of the American taxpayer — a program that has been successful, by and large.

Is that really what American taxpayers think about when they consider their support for welfare programs? Strip clubs? Only if you are a Republican, maybe, because everything in that case somehow relates to (gay) strip clubs.

Boustany’s office cited reports of welfare abuses in eight states, totaling millions of dollars. His legislation would not reduce spending directly, but would restrict how taxpayer funds can be used.

In one well-publicized example, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2010 that California welfare recipients were able to withdraw cash from their state-issued debit cards at more than half of the casinos in the state.

“We have an obligation to make sure taxpayer dollars are spent appropriately,” Boustany said.

Hahahaha, don’t you always love that one, “we need to make sure taxpayer dollars are being spent appropriately?” Because of “millions of dollars” being wasted by poor people! Wait, hang on…

Okay, let’s see, here we go, after four seconds of Google searching, here is this article about taxpayer waste that we remember reading in Forbes last year:

The Army’s biggest budgetary mis-step was a family of networked air and ground vehicles collectively called the Future Combat System. Although prime contractor Boeing managed to keep the program on schedule and on budget through a series of restructures, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates decided in 2009 that the project wasn’t ready for prime-time and canceled it after a staggering $19 billion had already been spent. Bloomberg Business News subsequently reported that the service had wasted $32 billion on doomed weapons projects since 1995.

OOOH but POINT: the billions of dollars invested in the defense industry create so many JOBS! JOBS EVERYWHERE! Counterpoint: strip clubs ALSO provide jobs — jobs that don’t build giant terror machines used for killing people all over the world, which is true no matter how you feel about strip clubs.

So here’s a modest proposal: maybe instead we should actually expand our taxpayer-sponsored program for strip club visits and allocate $19 billion to give the millions of poors and the six or so middle-class workers still left all the chances they want to go see a mostly-naked person writhe around in front of them LIVE instead of having to sit through all the godawful commercials on TEEVEE to watch the same thing and there might even be ten or so dollars left over to send an Afghan kid to school for a year instead of murdering her. God.