Your Tax Dollars At Work

Lyrics

[Spoken Intro] This song, for the most part, is a true story [Song] In a quiet lab, back in ol' D.C There's a man who works for an agency In what some would say is a mighty strange career He takes a bottle of ketchup and pours it out real slow Then he uses his watch to see how fast it will flow And the government pays him 70,000 a year And it sometimes comes out fast And it sometimes comes out slow And it helps the time to pass When he listens to the radio And sometimes when he's really bored He'll pretend he's Captain Kirk This is your tax dollars at work Things were going slow for the space program So they asked for a quarter-million dollar grant To send a sweet potato to outer space And in Washington University Some professors got a federal subsidy To observe the way that earthworms defecate And it sometimes comes out fast And it sometimes comes out slow And what these guys are trying to find Heaven only knows I wonder how we'll benefit From the fruits of this research This is your tax dollars at work And we've expended funds to the Pentagon So they could buy a 2000 dollar John Or a coffee pot for the price of a Monet And Andre Serrano got his start By pissing in a bucket and calling it art And receiving 30 grand from the NEA To subsidize some artsy-fartsy, fecal fetish jerk It's all your tax dollars at work And for several weeks Congress went on hold For a filibuster on gun control By the Republicans and some Democrats from the South Well instead of paying 20 million bills Buying fertilizer for their districts' fields We should use the stuff that comes out of their mouths And it sometimes comes out fast And it sometimes comes out slow And all the while the government payroll Is shelling out tons of dough 'Cos whether it's a two-faced hack Or the postman gone berzerk It's all your tax dollars at work And in Washington they've got limosuines While they say they feel our pain But the mayor doesn't feel anything 'Cos he's smoking crack cocaine I never knew that sex and drugs Was a governmental perk It's all your tax dollars at work This is your tax dollars at work