Category: Political humor

As of today, a budget compromise seems near complete. The MAGA-Steroids do not, it appears, to have the votes to stop it because a fair number of Democrats will vote for it. It’s complicated, of course. Nonetheless, it’s not absolutely resistant to me, an amateur historian, or to my spouse, a University of Pennsylvania Communications major, and the mental machinations of three university trained engineers who comprise my family of in-laws. This surely qualifies as a brain trust; after all, the Heritage Foundation, chock full of addlebrained Right-wing PhD’s has long been considered brain trust worthy by other groups of addlebrained foundations, liberal and conservative. I, being the most addlepated member of this group, was immediately selected as the Director-In-Chief, I believe primarily because I would be the easiest one to blame for our output should our mission have failed. Be that as it may, working together, often with me in one room, and my spouse and two brothers-in-law and one sister-in-law in another far more spacious and better furnished another, we set to our task.

I immediately considered my qualifications as an amateur historian and decided to use what I learned from a course (college level) in the First World War (1914-1918), a course in which I was awarded a C+ and quite representative of the kind of grade I was capable of if I put my mind to it. So, WW1 had a very complicated beginning, with juicy events like a major assassination in Sarajevo, a bunch of insults flying to an fro from Austria, Germany, England, France, and Eastern Europe. In the event, putting many rather boring events aside, territorial in invasions followed in quick succession only to end four years later in a world of hurt. However, the map of the European theatre of war and the various troop movements and countries involved seemed to me to represent the very complicated “map” of this, and other, budget processes throughout our modern history. So obvious was this, I felt I had no need to delve further. I spent my time drawing a map of those WW1 events and presented it to the engineers as my contribution.

This group of four very down-to-earth mechanical and electrical engineers, and one Communications graduate (University of Pennsylvania, if I neglected to mention it) had struggled for a few days trying to translate Congressional budget procedures into engineering lingo. This had produced blackboards filled with so-called “equations” and symbolic language that frankly caused me to lose all feeling in my brain for a few hours. Despite that, once back in mental shape, I immediately noticed that my chart of the nations’ movements during WW1 matched exactly their map of what they called the quasi-electrical circuits of the budget process! We then simply overlaid their circuit map over my map of Europe – exact to the millimeter.

Knowing we had cracked the code we celebrated like the folks at Bletchley after they’d solved the German’s WW2 Enigma code. Awakening en masse thirty hours later we celebrated again; this family of ours is addicted to celebration. We make no apologies, especially since it yielded the elegant chart below which combines science and history and communications theory at the highest level.

We hereby introduce the world to our Laypersons’ Guide to the Congressional Budget Process. Simply begin following the lines from Sarajevo and continue in consecutive fashion for the easiest budget process chart you will ever find on the internet. What a glorious blending of science and humanities in this time when people scoff at the scientific method, if I do say so myself and for three engineers and one University of Pennsylvania Communications graduate.