Last year’s $862 billion “stimulus” included payments of $250 to more than 50 million people who were getting either Social Security or Supplemental Security Income. But payments totaling $18 million also went to about 72,000 dead people, the Social Security Administration recently admitted. They also went to more than 17,000 prison inmates, at an additional cost of $4.3 million.
Some of the payments to the dead have been returned voluntarily by honest relatives of the deceased. But “there is no provision in the law to recover payments incorrectly sent to dead people,” The Associated Press reported.
The law enacting the so-called “stimulus” also made no provision to deny the payments to the thousands of prison inmates who received them. Does that lack of accountability make any sense?
Of course, payments to the dead and to prisoners are only a drop in the bucket compared with the overall waste of the $862 billion stimulus. President Barack Obama vowed that unemployment would remain below 8 percent if Congress approved the stimulus. But joblessness is now almost 10 percent – and our nation is hundreds of billions of dollars further in debt because of this big spending.
Is that sort of waste the right economic path for our country?