Bright Shiny Object
by digby
Yesterday I had a chance encounter with a wingnut who insisted to me that the stimulus money had all gone to dead people. I had no idea what he was talking about until I read this nonsense. Apparently, some of the 250.00 stimulus checks were mailed to dead people and people in prison thus proving once more that government is inept and should be disbanded except for police and military. (What does that look like do you think?)
Here’s the truth of the the matter, from Joshua Holland at Alternet:
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.
Meanwhile, the entire mortgage industry, which includes most of the largest banking and financial firms in the world, has just been revealed to have performed with epic incompetence and massive corruption resulting in the crashing of the economy and ongoing pain and hardship for millions of Americans. But there’s nothing to see there at all — it’s the efficient free market in action providing goods and services to people at a fraction of the cost of any government service. Except it’s not. But hey, the Galts get richer and the idiot parasites keep coming back and asking for more, so I guess we all get what we deserve.
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