Even the Dead Offered a Stimulus!

Stimulus Checks On Their Way - to Dead People

Friday, May 15, 2009 10:51 AM
By: Dan Weil

Millions of people are getting a Social Security check in the mail this week. But there’s a slight problem: Thousands of them are dead.

Part of the $787 billion stimulus package Congress passed included a $250 payment to Social Security recipients who aren’t working.

The idea was to put these people on equal footing to workers who are getting a tax break through the stimulus legislation.

Antoniette Santopadre of Valley Stream, N.Y., expected to receive her $250 stimulus check. But when it arrived, her son discovered that it was made out to her father, Romolo Romonini.

He was a U.S. citizen when he left for Italy in 1933 but returned to this country only for a seven-month visit in 1969, dying in Italy in 1975.

“That blows my mind, absolutely blows mind,” Santopadre told Fox 5 New York.

Her son Ronald was a bit surprised too. “It’s unbelievable how somebody who was never part of the system, that left this country before Social Security, that the only time we’ve ever received anything, the one time is this stimulus check.”

Others are in the same boat — about 8,000-10,000, the Social Security Administration says.

The agency mailed 52 million checks in total and says some of them went to the dead because the feds had no record of their deaths.

Social Security officials blame a rushed schedule, because all the checks have to be cut by June.

Bridgett Warner of the Heritage Foundation points out that the error may be a sign of more troubles to come.

“Given that the ‘stimulus’ money is being rushed out the door, one can only imagine how much waste and fraud will occur,” she writes on the Center for Fiscal Accountability’s Web site.

http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/stimulus_dead_recipients/2009/05/15/214730.html

Being dead should not be held against these people receiving SS stimulus checks! We know they will not send it out of the country as a remittance!
With apologies, but I just had to snark. Our taxpayer dollars go to pay for these employees and their fancy computer systems, and since one is apparently unable to work the fancy machines, or cares to research records and enter the info, then we have wasted money again. In other words, what else is new?

Snark as much as you need to in order to keep your cool! I wouldn't want you going off and getting called a potential right-wing extremist terror suspect by the DHS, so vent, vent!

Seriously though, can you imagine the level of waste, incompetence, and fraud that is violating American wallets through the TARP, Stimulus, and bail-out funds (as if the pork barrel earmarks weren't doing enough damage already)? People from State governments right on down to would-be small businessmen/women are angling for these dollars and I don't think there will be many guilty consciences at the end of the day. From where I'm sitting it looks like the chaos at the handbag table 5 minutes after Macy's opened for the big year-end clearance sale!