It has become a set piece of political theater for liberal Democrats, carried out in recent weeks by everyone from New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner to Connecticut senator Chris Murphy and a bevy of congressmen: attempting to eat on the $4.50-per-day food budget supposedly provided by the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the program formerly known as “food stamps.” While always good for a headline, and generally accompanied by amusing photographs of the bizarre meals the politicians cobble together on their meager budget, the so-called SNAP challenge is also arrant nonsense.

It looks like the cost of Arlington County’s gold-plated bus stop will be even higher than a $1 million. According to the Washington Post, taxpayers will also have to pay for an “independent contractor to review the cost and design” of the Transit Taj Mahal in Northern Virginia.

A miracle happened in Washington last week. Legislators failed in their attempt to mulct the public.

It’s a good thing that the farm bill failed to pass the House, but it is disturbing that about three-quarters of Republicans voted in favor of this massive spending bill. The House bill would have spent 47 percent more over 10 years than the 2008 farm bill ($940 billion vs. $640 billion). Most of the spending is for food stamps, so GOP farm bill supporters would have essentially ratified the recent huge spending increases on this welfare program.

This week the Indianapolis Star published an op-ed I wrote on Indiana state government’s reliance on federal funds. I said that “Most Hoosiers would be surprised to know that under [Gov. Mike] Pence’s first budget proposal, federal funds would have accounted for around 35 percent of total state spending.”

Congress is gearing up to pass a major farm bill for the first time since 2008, and this year’s bill threatens to be much larger than the last one.

When he was a high-ranking conservative Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Pence was a chief critic of Washington’s out-of-control spending and growing debt. Now that he is Indiana’s governor, Pence is dependent on the same federal largesse that he bemoaned. Most Hoosiers would be surprised to know that under Pence’s first budget proposal, federal funds would have accounted for around 35 percent of total state spending.

It’s widely accepted that George W. Bush was a big-spending president. He was a social conservative, but not a fiscal one. To his credit, however, even Bush recognized how wasteful and unfair farm subsidies are, and he vetoed the last major farm bill in 2008.

To listen to much of the mainstream media recently, one would assume that the battle against the national debt has been won.

The 2013 Social Security Trustees’ report, released last week, is proof positive that you really can make numbers say whatever you want. By highlighting one set of “asset reserves” that showed some growth, the report gives ammunition to those who would rather not deal with the fact that the program is on a path to disaster.