If you ever run out of chuckles you only need to see what Congress is up to to fill up your laugh locker again. Unfortunately, the most comic of their shenanigans are painful and expensive for us.

For example, the healthcare stuff. One of its biggest ingredients is the promise that government will save countless billions in Medicare by trimming excess fat. Right.

If Jay Leno said that he would get a good laugh.

Let us list all the major programs the government has slimmed down. We can print them on the edges of a postage stamp. Correction, on one edge.

Do we really have to remind ourselves that Congress has never been in the business of trimming fat? It creates the stuff.

Government promises the healthcare reforms will cost $800 billion or so over so many years. Ooops, the cost they project is now over a trillion. Another laugh line for Jay Leno.

Let us list the big programs that cost anywhere near what the politicians promised they would. Let us list those that cost less than they promised. Your pen could run dry of ink before you started your list and you would not notice when you finished the list.

Toss the postage stamp. Such programs do not exist. And yet, when politicians declare their projections are for real, the media sop them up and spew them at us as if we should take them seriously. They belong on the comics page.