Bizarre, Congress, Society

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

28 thoughts on “Congress Spending Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars Each Year To Declare Days For Everything From Beverages To Pi”

  2. I’m with pete although I do appreciate a good cherry pi as well.

  5. Tony C, sure , sure, Euler’s number is all very fine but where are the bad but inoffensive jokes that can be associated with it? Can it be mined for T-shirt slogans? Can it motivate infrequent bakers to take to the kitchen to bake something in celebration that isn’t an all day, muti-step process involving rolled sponge cake and home-made butter-cream? Where is the catchy name for the holiday? Pi-day = cool, Log-day = endless off color jokes and innuendo you have to explain to your kids.

    I don’t see i working too well but you have a spokesperson ready-made thanks to Twin Peaks. I give you the “Log Lady”:

  8. I demand a day for Euler’s Number as well, the base of natural logarithms (2.718281828459 …). I think that took more genius to find than pi.

  9. Really? The United States has a GDP of about $15 trillion, the federal government budget is somewhere in the hundreds of billions (maybe trillions?) of dollars, and $381,600 for all the National Whatever Days is our problem? Really???

  12. How much does it cost to filibuster everything that’s presented in the Senate? How much does it cost to go to war for a decade at a time, with no end in sight?

    I’d prefer that they spend their time passing meaningless proclamations.

  14. Pffffffffffffffffffffffffttttt – whats $300k? I bet they spend more getting ice delivered to their offices every day (you do know that each congresscritter gets ice delivered to their offices every day, right?). Or how about the cost of having two GSA employees raise & lower flags every 30 seconds on the Capitol building so that they can provide “flags flown over the US Capitol” to the folks back home?

    If you took all the pointless expenditures on crap like this & totaled it up the DoD would have spent more than that in the time it took you to do the math.

  15. In Florida one year (80s or 90s I think) the Legislature made it illegal to insult vegetables. And I believe they were also trying to implement a state sand. Had to choose from the different types of sand. Apparently you have to be insane to be elected.

  16. idealist707 1, June 8, 2012 at 9:44 am

    Pi is not free, not if you compute it on an IBM 1610, and are charged for processor time. Of course that depends on how many decimals you want.

    bigfatmike 1, June 8, 2012 at 9:25 am

    … Pi day? Wonderful Pi day? Listen buddy, I want to wish you 314159 happy returns – at least.
    =================================
    idealist707, please give bigfatmike one decimal worth of time on that IBM 1810 of yours, so he can convert “314159” into “3.14159” … 😉

  18. Pi is not free, not if you compute it on an IBM 1610, and are charged for processor time. Of course that depends on how many decimals you want.

  19. What exactly do you have against holidays, huh??? I don’t care is it is Nationalist Chines Double Ten day or Canadian Maple leaf day. If it is a holiday I want to celebrate. And if we can take a day off form work so much the better.

    Pi day? You are objecting to Pi day? Wonderful Pi day? Listen buddy, I want to wish you 314159 happy returns – at least.

    Look, why don’t you sit down, take a sip of your very favorite beverage and celebrate World Oceans Day. There, doesn’t that feel better.

    And tomorrow you can celebrate Anniversary of the Ascension of King Abdullah II (Jordan).

    That is the wonderful thing about holidays. Holidays bring people together in celebration. If you look hard enough you can nearly always find something to celebrate.

    Excuse me but I have to go and celebrate…something.

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