Maybe we really do get the government we deserve.
Maybe Americans have been so complacent, so self-absorbed, so anxious for entertainment, so undisciplined that we have actually deserved the sorry government we have developed.
Then again, perhaps the truth is that Americans are so corrupt we are only suited to corrupt government.
According to a new report, the government has been doling out huge amounts of tax dollars to dead people — and Americans all over the country just let it go on, while they pocket the proceeds.
A recent Associated Press reported noted: “A report says the federal government has doled out more than $600 million in benefit payments to dead people over the past five years.
“The payments are supposed to go to retired or disabled federal workers. But the Office of Personnel Management’s inspector general says sometimes the checks keep going out, even after the former employees pass away and the deaths are not reported.”
Someone is picking up the checks.
Someone is cashing them, apparently.
Otherwise, we aren’t really out anything. So someone is getting the tax money.
It would be an easy enough answer to just suggest that the government get cracking on cracking down.
The problem is, considering how our government works, we would undoubtedly spend more getting the money back that we would recover. All we would likely do is create another tier of never-ending federal careers and we’d go on paying those people until we were in ever worse shape than we were by just losing the money in the first place.
Not to mention, some of these people are never going to come up with this amount of money. “In one case, the son of a beneficiary continued receiving payments for 37 years after his father’s death in 1971. The payments — totaling more than $515,000 — were only discovered when the son died in 2008.”
So who do you go after? The great grandkids?
The heart of the problem is that we have too huge of a bureaucracy doling out too much money to too many people.
It all needs to be cut back, beginning with the bureaucracy.
What is truly terrifying is to consider how much we paid people all those years to waste $600 million. NOW we are talking about trillions of dollars.
And we will just go on spending that money until we get serious about down sizing our federal government.
— Chuck Smith