Grandkids and Dining

Xander is playing in the kitchen with play doh and Oma, so I am grabbing a minute to write my blog. I missed yesterday, but as I explained, the Xander-man is a handful and for some unexplained reason thinks I'm his best buddy. Maybe I shouldn't
play with him?

I do have a serious issue to discuss, and I invite anyone to challenge my mathematics, which are going to be my best guesses. Here goes:

Yesterday on "Today" they said that tomorrow we will spend one point seven billion dollars on restaurants. That's tomorrow, which is of course today,and again tomorrow, which will be tomorrow, and the day after that. In fact, we will spend $1,700,000,000 a day on eating out.

No wonder we're fat.

But wait, there's more.

Omlets, pancakes, croissants, pizza, burgers and fries, sushi, fried chicken, ravioli, steak, Mongolian fire pots, beans, potatoes au gratten and baked and julienned, tacos, escargots, and very, very occassionally a tossed salad, followed by cakes and pies and ice cream and tiramasu. Portions that could fill a plate and maybe choke a horse -- from the twenty ounce Porterhouse to blueberry pancakes by the stack to the ever-popular all you can eat buffets.

But wait . . .

$1.7 billion a day. In a year that's $620,000,000,000 -- almost two-thirds of a trillion dollars. That's about equal to what we spend on defense. In two years we will eat the equivalent of this year's budget deficit. Makes you think -- and want take-away.

It comes to $1,800 per person in America per year, including infants. That's $150 a month, $5 a day. Broken down like that, it makes bail-outs and deficits and overages seem not all that bad; or, our eating habits seem absurdly self-indulgent.

I'm not saying don't eat out. I'm just saying, keep things in perspective. When we complain about how much the government spends on things our citizens consider necessities -- like, oh, MediCare, Social Security, education, small business incentives, military pensions to name a few -- remember how much we citizens spend on a sheer luxury.

Gotta go. There's a new Applebee's opening tonight. Just kidding -- I no longer support Applebee's.