Peter Roskam was proud today to trumpet his crowning legislative achievement, the pinnacle of his career in Washington, the introduction of H.R. 5512, the Coin Modernization and Taxpayer Savings Act of 2008. (Actually, he says the bill was passed but I don’t see that in my usual references today).

Now, as Roskam candidly relates on his House website, this was actually a Democratic bill that passed. But he had previously thunk up many of its important points in H.R. 4036, the Cents and Sensibility Act of 2007, which early readers of this blog may remember. Apparently, the House Democrats were too embarassed to pass a bill with such a silly name so they stole Peter’s ideas and put them in their own bill.

Peter’s idea is a decent one. It currently costs us 1.7 cents to manufacture a penny, which is, for the moment at least, valued at 1 cent. The bill provides for changing the weight and metallic composition of the penny to save us money in it’s production. Peter figures we can save 1 billion dollars… over the next 10 years.

The problem with this is that Peter is stopping up a leaky faucet when he should be attending to the Niagara falls that is the military occupation of Iraq.

The one billion dollars that Peter saves with his pennies over 10 years we spend on one bad day in Iraq.

So here’s the deal, Peter. We want you to stop screwing around and stop the fucking war. Bring our troops home and stop spending our hard-earned tax dollars to rain down death and destruction on people half way across the world, most of whom don’t have the wherewithal or even the desire to do us any harm.
And while you’re at it, we don’t want to you to build any fucking golf courses or shopping malls in the fucking Green Zone.