When I make my monthly budgets, I carefully look at the amount of money I have coming in and going out. With my munificent salary I receive as an editor at The Daily Reveille, I have few worries. I set aside funds for food, bills, tobacco and gas. Anything left over I save, or spend on an occasional indulgence or emergency – such as buying a textbook the library, for some reason, doesn’t have.
It should not surprise anyone that our friends in Student Government spend money without such careful planning. After all, like most legislatures, SG is not exactly poneying any large amount of money themselves, but instead spending the money we as students provide them. I’m sure, no one was surprised to read the Senate has spent $1,243.87 on food for two meetings. Having not been present at these events – if I had, I assume my journalistic ethics and a churning stomach would have prevented my consuming food – I have no knowledge of the feast spread out before the assembled aspiring politicians and the audience. But let’s move on.
Hearing that figure Wednesday night, I wondered to myself, what exactly can $1,243 – I think I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and round down instead of up – buy these days? By doing some math, usually a loathsome procedure fit only for tax time or some class I made a C- in, I set about to my task with great interest.
For instance, at current prices, one could buy 44 cartons of Marlboro cigarettes – which translates into 24 cigarettes every day for a year. Now, I grant not everyone smokes, but that’s only my first example.
If one enjoys drinking, as some of my fellow students do, then there’s, thanks to the CCCC, $1.50 shots at Fred’s. One could purchase, with a 50 cent tip to the barman for each shot, 621 shots after midnight. Responsible senators and students think before they drink, so I can imagine that they would find a designated driver.
Speaking of driving. Gas prices are hovering around wallet exploding, bowel-shaking levels. At the station a few yards down from my house, Circle K on State Street and Highland Road, gas is going, for $2.79 for regular unleaded. One could purchase 445 gallons of this precious crude for one’s car, truck or lawnmower and not have to worry about the ever-increasing cost of driving around town. Now that’s piece of mind.
Well, where are you going to drive to? One could go to Major Video and rent videocassettes at a price of $6.53 for three, which amounts to 190 videos. Have fun muttering lines from “The Great Santini” in your sleep.
Or, maybe you’d prefer to go to Wal-Mart. They have loaves of French bread for $1.25. Thanks to an absence of sales tax on food, one could buy 994 loaves and pretend to be Jesus for a day on top of the Indian Mounds.
Maybe this situation has gotten to be too much for you, and you simply want to leave the country. I checked the website flights.com and decided to fly from Baton Rouge to Mexico City. For a total of $405.75, you can leave on May 4 and come back on May 11 refreshed from a week long vacation and stunned that you missed your finals. There’s even enough left over for hotels and other “services.”
Why am I mentioning all of these rather ridiculous options and not focusing on, as one of my colleagues asked me, serious items such as textbooks, pens and paper? I suppose I want to give my readers the feeling of the complete inanity of spending more than $1,200 on food for a bunch of individuals who spend money on themselves like drunken sailors and are only restrained when true outrage stops them such as the whole BlackBerry episode.
I have written before that I believe SG is a generally useless institution, ripe for abolition. Perhaps I was overhasty in my remarks. SG serves us in that it allows us one campus-wide joke. Watching future politicians eating away their funds is a precursor to what these folks would do if they were elected to offices with real power – like the city council of Pumpkin Center.
Is it just me, or does anyone else need a Tums?
 
Ryan is a history senior. Contact him
at [email protected]