Zombie Payroll: Feds Pay Out Over $1 Billion to the Dead

|| No need to dress up and go to work if you're dead, the government will pay you. ||

Braaains!

Just in time for Halloween…

We find out that the Federal Government has been paying the dead.

To the tune of $1 billion.

Turns out the federal government thinks that you can take it with you.

In the last 10 years, spanning two terms of George W. Bush’s administration and the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency, the federal government has dished out more than $1 billion to the deceased, according to a new report by Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, who serves as the ranking Republican on an investigative Senate subcommittee

The payments span the gamut, including $18 million to nearly 72,000 dead people from the economic stimulus funds from the Social Security Administration; an additional $40 million to deceased Social Security beneficiaries; nearly $4 million from the Health and Human Services Administration to pay heating and cooling costs; more than $1 billion in farming subsidies from the Agriculture Department to nearly 173,000 dead farmers (since the 1990s); $15 million from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to nearly 5,000 households with one dead person; and $92 million out of Medicare for medical supplies prescribed by dead doctors and $8.2 million for supplies sought by dead patients.

“These people won’t be hurt by spending cuts,” quipped John Hart, Coburn’s spokesman.

Halloween or not, it’s time to kill the government’s Zombie payroll.