Growls

CNSNews.com reported last week that federal government authorities paid $918,856 to study bar fights “tend to happen in darker, dirtier bars frequented by heavy drinking, less agreeable people.” The news outlet also reported, “The study also discovered that a woman who gets in a bar fight has consumed on average four times as many drinks as her usual intake.”

Wondering why you keep seeing similarly useless federal studies. Well, CNSNews.com “asked the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism how it would justify the $918,856 in tax dollars spent on this grant to the average family earning $52,000 per year.” Here’s the answer:

“Problems related to the excessive consumption of alcohol cost U.S. society an estimated $235 billion annually,” said NIAAA Spokesman John Bowersox. “Alcohol use, the third leading preventable cause of death in the U.S. is responsible for approximately 80,000 deaths annually.

“Alcohol-related violence is an important social and public health problem, and a substantial proportion of alcohol-related violence and injury occurs in licensed premises,” said Bowersox. “Analyses of aggression in bars will allow us to better u nderstand the alcohol-aggression relationship and identify specific aspects of barroom aggression for targeting prevention programs.”

What is needed, however, is for Congress to begin reducing the federal budget, and money going to the "National Institute of This" and the "National Institute of That" could be one of the first places that Congress can start looking.