You can put lipstick on a pig, but you can’t make it drink.
No, wait. That might not be true, or even entirely legal, since pigs of drinking age are something of a rarity, and who can afford to get caught drinking with an underage pig? (FYI, before you Google it – lifespan of a pig is somewhere around 8 years, and exponentially shorter if said pig happens to reside on a bacon farm.)
Let’s try this again.
Is your pig of drinking age?You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make a pig carry a purse. Or put lipstick on it. (The pig, that is, I’m not clear on horses and lipstick. Apparently, I’m not clear on any of this, and it seems to be catching.)
The only thing anyone is clear on is the distinct sense of not being entirely clear about where the trillion dollars we need for our infrastructure is going to come from. I feel like we’ve been led to the water, ordered a round of drinks, got stuck with the bar tab, and possibly left behind with a pig wearing lipstick.
It’s really hard to work up a lot of feelings that don’t involve fury when I try to understand how the United States can be presented with vast amounts of debt and no viable options to pay for basic infrastructure needs. It’s great to have ideas, it’s fully another thing to pay for them. It would be nice to have some leadership beyond, “Here’s a gigantic idea, with no plan or viable way to pay for it, good luck, and by the way, you’re a complete and total jerk if you don’t think this is wonderful.”
Go home, Washington, you’re drunk. All of you. Red, blue and green speckled polka-dot.
One thing is certain. We can’t keep stitching together the sow’s ear of an infrastructure and expect trillion-dollar silk purse outcomes.
