Want to know some of the crazier things the U.S. government is spending money to achieve this year?

The Independent Journal Review (no relation to the Independent Institute or the venerable Independent Review) just featured their list of the Top 25. Here’s a handful of the ones that really caught our imagination:

• $349,862 for meditation programs for math and science students. Because, well, math and science are hard!
• $515,000 to develop the “Shrimp Treadmill“. Because, well, science!
• $750,000 for the Smuttynose Brewery to connect its new brewery to local sewer lines. As we all know, there’s not enough of a market for beer in the U.S. that a small brewery can tap into to generate the revenue needed to build their own $22 million brewery without some kind of taxpayer assistance….
• $1,180,000 for puppet choreography. Hey, it’s a jobs program – not everybody can go into the well-paying, but hard fields of math and science!
• $639,884 to develop new flavors of beef jerky for the Pentagon. Many of which apparently already exist and can be bought at many supermarkets. But then, what’s a soldier supposed to eat along with their federally-subsidized Smuttynose beer?
• $880,000 for a study of snail sex. Because, well, science! Again! (Let’s face it, math and science aren’t just hard, they’re kind of gross sometimes too!…)

There are many more examples, but they deserve their own special focus!