FOR WHAT PURPOSE

Recently, my grand daughter and I were at a park in San Francisco and the serenity of a bright and sunny day was disturbed by the screaming overhead of these gloriously precisioned jets, the Blue Angels. They are the Navy's premier flying team, in San Fran for their yearly show called Fleet Week. Watching them practice was thrilling. Wow and more wow is what I thought!

But, later on in the day as I watched the stock market plunge to levels not seen in years, I began to think about the money spent on the "WOW" show of the Blue Angels and how many foreclosed homes that the Blue Angel money could save. And what about things like the trillions spent in Iraq. What about it? What does it all mean? For one thing, it is unbelievably complicated. How could saving on the Blue Angels possibly help the economy. It is the same view of eating one less expensive meal could hardly help the starving in Africa.

Well, it surely is complicated but there has to be some connection to our expenditures on the Blue Angels' air shows, the war in Iraq, all sorts of other things--to say it is too complex is to do or say nothing. Kind of like our present financial crisis, not figuring out how we got where we are is inexcusable: not coming to grips with the spending of millions of dollars on an air show and how it relates, is equally unacceptable.

It all has to be related. Having served at fairly high levels of the military, I use to marvel at the budget process. We operate within a budget. They must spend that money whether they need it or not or guess what? They will not get as much for next year. Spending more is even better (whether you need to or not) and that way you can asked for more.

So, how is it related? The Blue Angels have a budget, it is training and the thinking is that it relates to recruitment, kids will see the WOW of the Blue Angels and run right down and enlist.

We are too smart to simply let things like this continue. The Blue Angels are just symptomatic. I just bet if we were to dedicate ourselves to reining in purposeless spending that doesn't make sense, we could figure it out. These are tough times for the country and everything has to be on the table. Here's a good one, the Iraqis have an 80 billion dollar surplus, we have the worst deficit in history and are in crisis. Yet, we are spending billions a month in Iraq. Hello!!!!!!!!!!! Any North Carolina farmer can tell you how to handle this.