Wasted

This week, as the Senate devotes it's time to the weighty issues of flag burning and gay marriage, I thought I'd devote some time to the Senate.
From the fiscal year ending 9/30/2006, here are some of the expenses incurred in running the U.S. Senate:
Salaries, Officers & Employees                           $147,120,000
Expenses of Office of Sg't at Arms & Doorkeeper  $  36,000,000
Senator Official Personnel & Offce Expnse          $350,000,000   
Senate Portion Salaries of Capital Police             $108,728,000
Mntenace of Senate offices                              $ 15,745,000
Cost of Invstigtns & Inquiries                            $119,637,000

This is just to give you an idea - I won''t bore you with the whole budget.

Then you throw in some government printing, some GAO,a little building maintenance etc etc etc, and the U.S. Senate costs us around 1,713,000,000 (I am assigning joint expenses like the printing office equally to the House and Senate, which probably skews things a bit.) If it maintains it's current pace of meeting this year, it will be in session for about 163 days.  So we, as a nation, wasted a little over 10 million dollars yesterday to have the gay marriage bill defeated.

It costs 58,000.00 to armour a Humvee - we could have armored 17 of them with ten million dollars. We could have provided about 7,500,000 school lunches.

How many dollars will they burn on the flag burning crisis?

(and Yes, shame on Sen Clinton)