The comedian Steven Wright has built a career on one-line jokes.
A classic Wright one-liner unblinkingly and unsmilingly asks: “Twenty-four hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence?”
January seemed to brim with it own coincidences.
For example, at 10:28 a.m., Jan. 26, the U.S. Department of Agriculture e-mailed journalists a list of 70 U.S. trade organizations that would split $234.5 million US under the department’s market access and foreign market development co-operator program this year.
The two programs, noted USDA, “help promote American food and agricultural products overseas.”
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One big winner of export cash was the U.S. Grains Council, a self-de-scribed “private, non-profit partnership of farmers and agribusinesses committed to building and expanding international markets.”
This year, according to USDA’s accounting, the council will receive $4,033,859 to do just that.
Well, one can hope anyway. Exactly two hours after the USDA notice arrived that day, the grain council e-mailed a news release to announce the keynote speaker for its annual international marketing conference and membership meeting in sunny Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
Or, as Wright might say, $4 million in taxpayer money headed your way at 10:30 and by 12:30 you’re headed to a plush, Mexican beach playground for a five-day marketing conference in the middle of the Midwestern winter.
Coincidence?
The White House has experienced many moments of comic coincidence in its first year of herding finicky, navel-gazing Democrats wandering around Capitol Hill.
The latest is a presidential plan to tax “fat cat” bankers $9 billion a year for the next 10 years so taxpayers might receive a spoonful of the bonus pudding the bankers enjoy every January.
Fat though they may be, those city cats know how to the pluck D.C. canary.
After giving the president’s friends on the Hill a week to pick apart the “bonus tax” idea, the bankers quietly noted in late January that industry-wide bonuses for 2009 would total $150 billion, or 16 times what the White House wanted to nick them for this year.
Coincidence?
Definitely not. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, commercial banks, investment banks and Wall Street securities firms have, since 2008, paved Capitol Hill with $234.1 million in campaign cash.
That, er, investment – $234 million to save $9 billion – now carries a 3,846 percent return for 2010 alone.
A bonus coincidence is that Congress has yet to pass meaningful banking reforms and likely won’t in an election year.
The triple-gainer with a half-twist coincidence award, however, goes to our great friends at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.
Even before my recent column saw print about the behind-the-scenes fight between NCBA and the beef checkoff over proposed NCBA rule changes to make off-limits check-off cash more accessible while seeking to double the $1 per head checkoff, NCBA officials were selling both ideas to west coast cattle producers.
According an Oregon newspaper, NCBA chief executive officer Forrest Roberts told more than 400 Oregon cattle producers Jan. 25 “that ranchers attending the NCBA’s annual convention held Jan. 27-31 in San Antonio may be asked to consider doubling the beef checkoff to $2 a head.”
Coincidence?
