I'm not into sushi, Mom. I'm a vegetarian. Sushi has way too much seafood for me!

You know, the weather is warming up in D.C. It's a balmy 64 degrees today, which means Congress and the Obama administration are busy growing more hands to stick into everyone else's pockets.

Have you seen the "stimulus" bill yet? This is in addition to the bail-out money Obama asked for. Supposedly Congress' best efforts to stimulate the economy, the bill, which has been introduced in both the Senate and the House, is nothing more than a glorified bundle of earmarks. While conservatives will draw the line at bail-out money, they love earmarks as much as their liberal brothers and sisters. Remember Bush's veto they overrode? It was all about earmarks. If they want to stay elected, they've got to deliver the goodies back home. So basically, earmarks are about keeping elected people elected. And they complain about Wall Street bonuses!

Seriously though, I looked at just a chunk of the 100+ page stimulus bill last week and was surprised to find a lot of it dealt with healthcare "reform." My first question was what is healthcare reform doing in a bill like this. Then when I read the "reforms," I realized this had nothing to do with reform. It was all about identifying more ways to spend our money.

Granted, some of these projects are worthwhile -- if we had the money to spend on them. But, I remember, Mom, that you and Dad taught us to live within our means. You never let us borrow ahead on our allowance because you knew that next week we'd want something more and would be even deeper in the hole. You also taught us that if something were worthwhile, we needed to figure out our priorities and do some saving. How many years did it take Billy and me to save up our pennies, dimes and nickels to buy our first bikes?

I guess it's different, though, if you're not spending your own money. I'm sure most of our senators and congressmen and women are careful about how they spend their own money. In fact, a number of them dabble in creative financing just to reduce their personal tax burden or to get favorable credit terms the rest of us can't get. But when it comes to government spending, they don't have to be that careful. It's not their money, and they won't be around when the debt collectors come calling for the trillions of dollars we owe in national debt.

---Mari Serebrov