In a piece in today's Wall Street Journal, Victoria Toensing illustrates the FatCratz impulse with a few stories from government travel hell:
The government rules allowed no flexibility. If you traveled on a plane that served food en route, as was the case on my late afternoon flight from D.C. to New Orleans, you could not get reimbursed for eating after you landed. It mattered not that the food looked spoiled, and that you really did spend money on a restaurant meal. There would be no, albeit meager, $20 reimbursement for that dinner.
FatCratz doesn't deny the need for ethics regulations. But since all most Americans ever hear about are flagrant ethical violations, we have a constant call for more of them. Without any sense of how inflexibly they are applied, or what it is like to live under their sway.
But not for long.
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