There is a much talk these days about making government smaller.

While this is not an unreasonable approach, smaller guvmint can mean a lot of different things to different people.

One person’s pork may be another man’s steak. And if a politician wants the votes, bringing home the steak may be what needs to be done even as speeches are being made about cutting out the pork.

But if we are going to make guvmint smaller, then maybe it is time to really make it smaller.

We’ll start with Capitol Hill. Cut the size of the building in half. This means we can pack the rascals in like sardines and either they won’t go to work and nothing happens, which may not be a bad thing, or they will work hard just to get out of there.

This would work even better if we would only allow the water to be on four days out of the week. Having rancher congressman from Wyoming jammed up against the honorable representative from a fishing community in Louisiana for three days and you can bet legislation will start moving.

Making the building smaller will also save a lot of money on heating and air conditioning. Of course, there are some who would charge this would be an attack on big business, but I’m confident the power company in Washington can borrow someone from Georgia Power who can find a way to rationalize a rate increase even if the building is the size of the men’s room at the Texaco station.

We should require no bill introduced in Congress can be more than 1,000 words long. This means it would have to get to the point and not meander about and be cluttered up with a bunch of verbal legerdemain designed to hide its real intent.

Let’s get rid of all limousines the big shots in Washington use and make them ride in horse drawn carriages. First, this would put a lot of horses and coachmen to work.

And our fearless leaders should feel right at home standing behind a horse.

We can also demand that our legislators themselves get smaller.

While some of these folks are about as small as you can get and even specialize in having small minds, there is girth on Capitol Hill that would make a herd of mastodons proud.

The downside is if they started getting healthy we could be stuck with them longer.

But if we put a bunch of law-makers on a fruit and salad diet not only would they get smaller but think how much money could be saved at the congressional cafeteria.

And if we the put the money lobbyist use to pay for five course meals for legislators toward the national debt we could balance the books in about two years.

If that doesn’t work, we could require every legislators to have an enema once a week as this would almost certainly make guvmint smaller.

But even if it didn’t, it would make the rest of us feel better.