If you suddenly find yourself in charge of a vast bureaucracy that, unfortunately, governs a shrinking base of supplicants, what are you to do? Well, if you're Tom Vilsack, you redefine your mission:
"This is a department that intersects the lives of Americans two to three times a day. Every single American," he said. "So I absolutely see the constituency of this department as broader than those who produce our food -- it extends to those who consume it."
[. . .]
With President Obama at the government's helm, food activists have begun drafting policy wish lists calling for more nutritious food in schools, money for school gardens, and incentives and support for small producers who find it difficult to compete with industrial-size farms.
With a shrinking number of farmers, the poor USDA has been able to waste mere billions. But if it can start messing with every single eater, it can quickly get up to the trillionosphere now favored by government. The amount of money that can be spent inspecting every household's cupboards alone is staggering. We are what we eat, after all, and if the government doesn't care about who we are, what good is it?
Comments
Since the Billionosphere was already beyond nearly every individual's useful imagination, the exponential increase in predatory profits and gross waste represented by couching the identical notions in Trillionospheric terms are in peril of going unnoticed.
If you can't imagine billions of your treasure being misappropriated by con men, why would you rise up just because the terms shift with inflation to trillions, or even quadrillions? Somebody always pays it for you, right?
For most voting Americans, the nation's big bucks became Monopoly money long, long ago, and those of us who still try to keep up probably do most of the worrying for everyone else.
Not that I mind, but beware... I have no illusion that I understand the entire picture either.
If I did, I'd no doubt either take arms in revolt against the status quo or just explode on the spot, depending upon the mostly untested limits of my personal physical constitution.