Spendthrift Blockheads in Washington State Gov’t: Spend $2 to Mail $1
Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on February 23, 2009
By Vicki McClure Davidson * Frugal Café Blog Zone
Good grief.
Every time I turn around, it’s someone else in government earning the Conspicuous Consumption Blockhead Award.
Is anyone on the Washington state government board named “Charlie Brown”? (“You promise you’re not going to yank the football away this time, Lucy?” “Of course, I won’t do that, Charlie Brown, trust me.” Whooooosh, thunk. “Good grief.” “You’re such a blockhead, Charlie Brown.”)
Just released, the latest in a series of government’s fiscal immaturity and irresponsibility:
The state of Washington sent out $1 checks to the 250,000 food stamp recipients in the state.
The director of the Community Services Division for the Department of Social and Health Services, Leo Ribas, says the checks mailed Feb. 17 trigger an additional $43 million in federal food benefits. They also connect recipients to an energy assistance program.
Ribas says the $1 check is a one-time move to leverage the federal money. He says next year the state will be able to trigger the federal assistance through a routine deposit in food stamp accounts.
Did Ribas flunk basic math? How in the world does this benefit anyone to any sliver of a degree? Particularly the state’s budget? I need an aspirin…
The amount of time, labor, and postage to create these puny $1 checks must easily exceed $2, if not $3. You would need to figure in the cost of postage, employee wages for time spent running the software and producing the checks, office overhead with computers/printers/electricity, the stuffing of the envelopes, the buying of the envelopes, yada yada. And once it was received, how many people will be able to justify the cost of gas and their time to cash a ONE DOLLAR CHECK? It defies logic and sanity.
For more information on this latest episode of US government’s Charlie Brown-esque blockhead waste of money (this time, for a change, it’s not yours or mine that was wasted, just millions of tax payers in the state of Washington), Michelle Malkin covers it in her usual no-holds-barred, call-it-as-she-sees-it fashion. We are also uneasy, seeing this act of inexplicable stupidity as perhaps being a more sinister (disguised to be stupid) prelude to setting something else up with the porkulus bill, but have no idea what that would be. Yet another conspiracy theory dancing through our head… we could be wrong, too.
Charlie Brown was the laughingstock of the Peanuts characters… just ask Lucy next time she has a football who’s the blockhead.
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