This week, thousands of people are getting stimulus checks in the mail. The problem is that a lot of them are dead. A Long Island woman was shocked when she checked the mail and received a letter from the U.S. Treasury — but it wasn’t for her.
Antoniette Santopadre of Valley Stream was expecting a $250 stimulus check. But when her son finally opened it, they saw that the check was made out to her father, Romolo Romonini, who died in Italy 34 years ago. He’d been a U.S. citizen when he left for Italy in 1933, but only returned to the United States for a seven-month visit in 1969.
The Santopadres are not alone. The Social Security Administration, which sent out 52 million checks, says that some of those checks mistakenly went to dead people because the agency had no record of their death. That amounts to between 8,000 and 10,000 checks for millions of dollars.
The feds blame a rushed schedule, because all the checks have to be cut by June. The strange thing is, some of the checks were made out to people — like Romonini — who were never even part of the Social Security system.
(Source: MyFoxNY)
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6 Responses
I guess President Obama has more followers among the dead than among the living
1. Especially given our experience in Europe in the last century, maybe we shouldn’t be anxious for a European style population registry that enables the government to know exactly who is living, where they live, etc. Do you really want to have to file a “change of address” with the government every time you move. Absent such a registry, such mistakes are inevitable. Remember that the same list that allows accurate voting and social security records, and also be used for roundups in 100 years, if our fortunes should change.
2. If you agree that the goal is to prevent a depression, then from a macroeconomic (Keynesian) perspect, it doesn’t make any difference how wise money is spent as long as it is spent. Throwing benjamins out of a helicopter would work just as well (the chairman of the Fed proposed this, though in reality he prefers to use his cheat button to print more money).
that is how we democrats and the obama white house stimulet and blame every one elas for your mistakes
somehow this will end up cheneys fault
haha #4, it so is Bushes (both of them) fault not really Cheney, lets allow him to age in piece
maybe Obama wants the dead to have a little cash after Tchi’aat Hametim. 🙂