A group of Republican Senators from the Finance and Ways and Means committee recently took three days of recess in order to evaluate the White House stimulus package, the housing package, and the bank bailout programs. After dissecting the new spending initiatives and combining this information with figures on more traditional sources of government spending, the Republicans party issued a statement:

“The Democrats’ numbers don’t add up”

“It’s worse than a mess. It will lead to taxes in the future,” said Senator R. Shelby of the Finance committee.

According to key Republican Senators, Democrats are deliberately running large deficits now in order to force through future tax increases.

“We know what they are doing—force feeding the government beast so they increase its appetite for the money of future taxpayers. They are clearly playing a game of poultry,” stated a Republican spokesperson.

When asked to explain, the Republican spokesperson added:

“If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then clearly the quacks have feathered their government nests with chicken games over future taxes.”

Republicans were also clearly upset with the just published results of a congressional poll on government accounting. According to the congressional survey report when one hundred and ninety two Democratic congressmen were asked the question:

“What comes after a trillion?”

One hundred and sixty four were reported to have “correctly” answered:

“A quadrillion”

The many Republicans who answered:

“A trillion and one”

were reported to have given the wrong answer.

Republicans charged this interpretation of the survey report favored Democratic members of both Houses. Furthermore they charged that the survey report failed to highlight the obvious bias the Democrat answers showed towards fiscal recklessness.

Republican anger was further heightened when an independent Senator from Rhode Island, who asked to remain anonymous, is said to have claimed:

“One could just as well answer a trillion and two, or a trillion and three, as well as a trillion and one; or even a quadrillion. All those numbers correctly come after a trillion.”

Upon hearing this statement the Democratic Capitol Hill Committee put out the following statement:

“Any answer is right. There are trillions and trillions of numbers that come after a trillion. In fact, there is an infinity of numbers after trillion.’

It was at this point that Republicans charged Democrats of not knowing their math.

“The other side of the aisle is showing plain ignorance when they don’t know the difference between infinity and, infinity plus one trillion. Their statement just indicates the mindset that their government loving hearts and heads are in. And everybody knows infinity is not a real number. It’s just a place where the Democratic deficits are taking the nation.”

The Democrats immediately hit back by offering a new deficit reduction package that included small increases in cigarette taxes, a paring down of agricultural subsidies, and a new proof of Poincare’s 3rd topological conjecture concerning a convex rotation of an n-tuple dimensioned Torus in state space.

The Democratic proposal elicited some thinly drawled commentary from Alabama Senator R. Shelby.

“Oh, no, it’s them tuples again! Back when,—-I looked all over my high school for just a one. I never could find nary a tuple in any durn numbered spot anywhere. If there’s a person who can find one of those high-school mathbook tuples, I’ll pay half of my salary for it.”

In response to the Alabama Senator’s remark, Democratic Senator C. Dodd of Connecticut admitted. “I never saw a tuple myself. But I know that in the previous century mathematicians were obsessed with counting them. Maybe they went the way of the buggy whip.”

The heated rhetoric began to die down when both Houses of Congress entered separate bills to fund government searches for tuples, or tuple-like objects, throughout each state in the nation. A group of Republicans from the finance committee added two riders to the tuple bill: the first, stating that if any tuples are found, that their value be linked to the price of gold. The second Republican sponsored rider would order publishers of high school math books to replace the word “tuple” with “widgets.”

A Democratic rider, which would order publishers of economic books to replace the word “widget” with “tuple” does not, at this time, seem as if it will be in the final bill.

Odac Snarler