FROM MY EMAIL

Another of the emails that regularly come around:

Does anybody remember the reason given for the establishment of the Department of Energy during the Carter Administration?

Anybody? ... No? ... Didn't think so. Bottom line .. we've spent several hundred billion dollars in support of an agency ... the reason for which no one can remember.

It was very simple and at the time everybody thought it very appropriate. The Department of Energy was instituted on August 4, 1977 to lessen our dependence on foreign oil.

And now it’s 2008, 31 years later, and the budget for this necessary department is $23 billion a year. It has 6,000 federal employees and approximately 100,000 contract employees and look at the job it has done!

This is where you slap your forehead and say “What was I thinking?” And now we are going to turn the banking system, auto industry, and health care over to them?

Another example of an unintended but easily foreseeable consequence of a "good idea."