Government provides us laughs at our expense

This is the time of year when I get all teed off just thinking about what an honor it is for us to pay taxes.

I’m not kidding. When I send my money to the government, those guys and gals in Washington, D.C., return the favor by providing me with some genuine belly laughs.

That’s because they find such creative and amusing ways to spend my hard-earned cash. Ways such as studying why pigs smell, for example.

According to a group wishfully named Citizens Against Government Waste, Congress plumbed the public trough for a couple of million dollars last year in order to delve into that urgent matter.

Now, I’m no genius — which is why I’ll never be allowed to run for office — but I’m thinking we could just all agree that pigs do smell (although the stinky swine might argue the point) and move on to something else.

Or take the problem of how to use wood. About $95 million of our money has been spent since 1985 on wood utilization research.

You’d think that, given mankind’s long experience with wood, we could call it good and use those dollars for something else. But what do you know?

We’re spending an additional $4 million on wood research this year, so obviously there is still some concrete information left to discover.

And while we’re paying a lot of attention to wood, the politicians don’t want us to develop a baa-humbug attitude regarding wool.

That’s why they’re spending a good chunk of our change to figure out how to use the sheep stuff. (Hint: they could use it to make a sweater.

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