Have you had enough of the bailouts? Me, too. It's time for some straight poop, or at least some poop alternatives. Yes, they let me loose on the newspaper soap box again, even after the terrors of my last column.

Economic news and political actions of the past 60 days have me wondering if I should find a box to climb into so I can hide, or just sit and watch it all to enjoy the fluttering.
Why, they’ve even coined a new word, “Obamunism,” and promised a National Tea Party Day for April 15, when everybody is supposed to mail a tea bag to the White House to protest for no more taxes.
They’ve called for protest demonstrations in cities across the country all because our president and Congress have proven their love for AIG.
I might go to a protest if they have one in Pilsen.
With all the mumbo-jumbo talk-speak going on in Washington, local guys still can come up with clear ideas. I thought Dale Franz had one.
But then, Dale has to manage a real grocery store in the real town of Hillsboro, so he doesn’t have time for big-time foolish wisdoms.
Dale said the incredibly federal-wise might have done better to have given each of us $60,000. He might have bought a new car to help bail out the automakers, and then paid down on his mortgage to bail out bankers.
I’d have bought another pair of blue jeans and a dark chocolate bar, myself.
That’s the problem with real businessmen. Dale isn’t convoluted enough for political elegance. Most of the people I know aren’t even nearly as warped as me, and that’s just not good enough for upper echelon politics.
So, here I go again, picking on poor Howard Collett, who, when he was a county commissioner, in casual conversation, which I’m sure he never expected to see in a newspaper, reminisced on the good old days of the
first depression when one infrastructure payout was to provide money for every farm to build a concrete privy, an outhouse, a place for human excreting, you know, Sears Catalogue extrapolation.
That was nearly a long enough sentence to qualify me for Congress.
Anyway, my whole point was that if they had given me something out of all this as personal as a place to poop, I might feel better. They even made the toilet's name personal. It was called the Eleanor after Eleanor Roosevelt. What I couldn't do with a short sit over the Michelle Obama pit.
Alas, the leadership lacks imagination. They don’t even give a poop, poor boys dancing to the rich boys’
tune once again. It looks like the system is falling apart to us easily panicked fellows. Everything American could carry the label “Made in China,” print it on every crisp new $20 bill.
There is the comfort for me of an old acquaintance in Topeka, Bob Armstrong. Bob said it pleased him when he did have to pay taxes because it meant he was making money.
He went on to say that people usually don’t understand that it’s the job of government to do those functions needed by society that lose money.
If it was truly profitable to build roads, he said, private companies would be building them.
You can carry this on to ask yourself if, say, all the health care truly needed by society is provided, or if we need the money-losing segment of our culture to take it on. Will nurses and doctors provide the best of
care when money losers determine their pay?
Government can use its money-losing ventures to profit other entities, such as when it makes war to pay for weapons developers, subsidizes agriculture to run more farmers off the land, or bales out investment
bankers for Bahamian weekend jaunts.
Even those roads it builds can help you and me in local commerce. Folks like the county road and bridge department workers are doing quite a lot
with their tax-paid labor to subsidize General Motors and Schwin.
Marion and Hillsboro both got street-building money from the federal stimulus funds. That might be good, I think, I guess. Their economic development directors are justified in the never-ending battle to prove that government works.
It’s all a matter of what you want government to lose money for. I might have enjoyed a peanut-dispensing machine on every street corner.