http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/10/08/dead-people-getting-stimulus-check-and-the-making-of-a-right-wing-meme/Dead People Getting Stimulus Checks and the Making of a Right-Wing Meme
Posted by Joshua Holland on @ 1:14 pm
Article printed from speakeasy:
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasyBreitbart, the folks at Reason and Powerline and a whole slew of right-wingers are all over this report which found that the government sent 72,000 stimulus checks to dead people. It fits nicely into their over-arching narrative of an incompetent government staffed by pasty-faced bureaucratic dullards incapable of doing anything right other than wasting your hard-earned money.
Oh, and prisoners! 17,000 of them. Viscious criminals getting checks courtesy of good Americans toiling away in the burbs!
A taste, courtesy of the appropriately named blog, Scared Monkeys.
In just another example of the waste and ineptitude of “Big Government”, it is being reorted that SSA, Social Security Administration,has sent 89,000 Democrat and Obama approved stimulus checks of $250 were sent to either individuals that were dead or in prison. NICE!!!
Here’s the deal. The one-time stimulus payments — $250 a pop — were sent to 52 million people. Of that number, 72,000 had died relatively recently. That works out to .0014 of the payments sent, meaning 99.86 percent reached a living soul.
That’s not evidence of incompetence; it proves what common sense should suggest is obvious: any large instituion, public or private, sending mail to 52 million people will always send a small fraction — a 10th of one percent in this case — to the recently deceased. (8/10 of 1 percent of Americans died last year.)
The AP notes that half of those checks were returned. This is how things work when someone dies — checks, and bills, continue to arrive until the estate gets settled.
The prisoners had only been incarcerated during the past 3 months. They were in fact eligible for the checks because they’d been on the Social Security rolls until they were locked up.snip//
PS: Just how did they uncover this explosive scandal? Did James O’Keefe get some female IRS employee onto his boat and charm the tale out of her? Maybe the intrepid wingnuts at Powerline have some kind of Deep Throat-like whistle-blower on the inside?
No, the Social Security’s inspector general — the gum’mint! — found these errors and released a report. Transparency, you know?
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