OK... this story is the perfect example of what is wrong with Congress:

For a decade until his defeat last year, Sen. Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican, stocked the desk with donations from home-state candy makers including Hershey Co. and Just Born Inc., maker of Hot Tamales and Peanut Chews.

With Mr. Santorum gone, the desk, which is dipped into by many members, has been turned over to Sen. Craig Thomas, a Republican from Wyoming. But his state is better known for bison than bonbons -- and that's a big problem.

Ethics rules forbid members accepting gifts worth $100 or more a year from a single source. One exception covers items produced in a senator's home state -- so long as they're used primarily by people other than the senator or his staff. The provision was crafted to allow senators to offer visitors home-grown snacks, such as Florida orange juice or Georgia peanuts.
...
One option is to turn to mom-and-pop shops in Wyoming that make, or re-package, sweets with a frontier flair. Bessie Zeller has a family business, Queen Bee Gardens, in Lovell, Wyo., which produces caramel-like candies from honey. She already sends about 24 pounds of candy, worth about $185, every couple of months to members of the state's congressional delegation. She gets some payment for the goodies. "I don't think we can afford to donate it all," she says.
...
Senate ethics rules may give Mr. Thomas some wiggle room, allowing him to seek contributions from senators whose states are more richly endowed, something he says he is contemplating. Robert Kelner, who heads the election and political law practice at Covington & Burling LLP, says a candy company could "in theory" send less than $100 worth of candy to each senator over the course of the year and not violate gift limits.

Says Mr. Hardy, the senator's spokesman: "I'm sure we'll get through it somehow."

You'll notice that during the course of the entire article (except to point out how the "Candy Desk" originally started), not a single Senator thought one of the options to solve this "problem" was to chip in money to buy candy themselves.  Even in something as simple as a "candy desk", the good Senators seem to think that they deserve to get it for free.  They're even willing to take donations from mom and pop candy stores that really can't afford to donate a lot of candy, just so they don't have to pay... for candy.  If you can't figure out how to pay for candy yourselves, and make this big a deal out of it... why should we expect you to be able to solve any real world problems?

Do you even own wallets?  Via On Deadline.