“Use it, or lose it”

The demonrats are having vapors over the DOW spending money at the end of the budget year on steak and lobster.
If you get $100 million in your yearly budget, and you only spend $95 million of it. You will lose the excess $5 million. It won’t be used to pay down the debt, it won’t be ‘saved’, it will be given to another agency. The next budget year, you will get $5 million less. Therefore, everyone runs around trying to spend all of the money at the end of the fiscal year.

Here is a story about spending excess DOW money.

MBB, retired from the US Navy as a Captain (O-6).
When he was a Lt Commander (maybe Commander), he was given the command of the EOD unit, Barbers Point HI. This shop was responsible for all torpedoes, and Tomahawk missiles used by the Pacific Fleet.
As part of his command takeover, he had to inspect and inventory everything. While doing this, he came upon a locked warehouse. It was at least 200x100 feet, with a 50 foot ceiling. Once he was able to find the key to the warehouse in order to open it, he was floored by what he found.
It was absolutely filled, front to rear, floor to ceiling with printer paper. Pallets, and pallets and pallets of printer paper. You couldn’t even walk in the warehouse. He immediately got on the phone to his boss, whom then patched in the Admiral.

‘Sir, tell everyone in ‘PAC-FLT’ not to buy anymore printer paper. We’ve got enough to last 10 years or more.”

He was off by just a few years.
Only because some of the paper had been in the warehouse so long, and the environment is so humid, it had solidified into cardboard.

The EOD unit had been spending end of fiscal year excess money on printer paper for years.

Picture: My Big Brother and I, The Acropolis, Athens Greece