big ticket

Some leave the field of play for a while to come back mostly for the big ticket moments.

So we've got, like in my subcommittee, we've the space station, but overall in appropriations we have the space station, we have super collider, we have the mapping of the genetic code, and all three of these are really big, and then there is the superconductor, but all three are really big tickets, significant big tickets.

I was driving and stopped at a red light, but unfortunately I had crossed the stop line by a faction of an inch (or, may be by a few inches), then the rookie traffic officer came to me with his big ticket pad. And wrote me a big ticket.