Washington lawmakers are close to a deal that would reduce the nation’s weather supply in order to fund more important government services. The bill under consideration, the Weather Conservation Act of 2011, is the direct result of a Wolf Report editorial.
“When you’re faced with either defaulting, or with cutting national defense, Social Security, Medicare, or weather,” says Rep. Tom Gaskill, R-North Dakota. “The answer is simple: excess weather has to go. I don’t know why we haven’t seen this sooner.”
“We now realize that our weather programs, most of which were created by Republicans, are wasteful,” says Rep. Donna Morgan, D-New Jersey. “We provide weather twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty five days a year, to one hundred percent of the country, whether people need it or not. Our studies show that almost no one uses more than about a third of that weather, and most people use even less. In regions where population is sparse, nearly all of the weather is wasted. And some people, especially those living in cities, would be happy with no weather at all.”
While Congress decides exactly how much weather to cut, not everyone is happy with the idea. “We need more weather, not less,” says Tom Billllllinger, a stuttering 30-year old farmer in Iowa. “Without weather, how in the hell do we grow our crops? And without crops, how in the hell do we get farm subsidies? For the next 35 years we can do without Social Security and Medicare before we can do without weather.”
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which evaluates the economic impact of legislative changes, agrees that we overspend on weather. “We’ve looked at both the costs and the benefits of weather,” said Jim Meltzer, spokesperson for the CBO, “and we find that weather is the most wasteful of all federal programs. The costs are high, and the benefits are small. If we took advantage of all the potential savings, we could use the money to build more than 30,000 bridges to nowhere.”
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