Congress Spending Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars Each Year To Declare Days For Everything From Beverages To Pi

Many of us have long mocked the effort by members of Congress to curry favor with different groups by declaring every day to be observances for everything from National Pi Day to Education and Sharing Day to National Child’s Day (a May day not to be confused with Child Health Day in August). I recently cringed with the announcement of National Beverage Day. That’s right, not any particular beverage. Any beverage. Congress has gradually created a type of value ranking to deliver the goods for such groups. Some warrant only a day while some warrant a month like “National Safe Digging Month” while others get a whole year like “Year of Water.” Now, someone has bothered to track the costs of all of the pandering. In the 112th Congress alone, the Senate has passed or agreed to 318 simple resolutions and introduced over 100 more — costing taxpayers $381,600. This does not include staff time and other costs.

Each of these days comes at a printing cost alone of $1200 for each resolution.

I was particularly miffed when I had to share my birthday with National Beverage Day — with the slogan “BE BOLD! Take advantage of Beverage Day to try a beverage that you have never had before.” I am struck by the clearly useless function of such a holiday. Beverage is such a generic term that it has as much impact as “National Food Day.” Of course, when you call for people to drink something on this day, you are guaranteed success. What is more important is the beverage lobby can report that it got its own day and members can give lobbyists something to show their fealty to the industry.

It may be easier to simply declare “National Celebration Day” where citizens are encourage to celebrate anything from beverages to snack foods to rickets prevention. They could at least try to combine days like appeasing both mathematicians and beverage companies with a day calling for “Drink Something With Your Pi Day.” It would be good to have just one day where I am not being told to celebrate something. As a committed citizen, I spend half of my time trying to find a way to honor safe digging or beverages as instructed by my leaders.

What will clearly not pass is “Responsible Legislating Day” where our leaders actually address problems from the economy to unemployment. That would be ridiculous.

Source: Daily Caller