Last year the federal government incorrectly paid $67 billion to people and places it should have never gone to, including to many dead people.
In Kite and Key Media’s recent explainer “I Pay Dead People,” a narrator breaks down how billions of taxpayer dollars go “missing” because of government errors and ultimately wind up in the hands of a random rapper or a health care mogul.
“You’d think they’d have absolutely nothing in common. And you’d be right except for one thing. Probably unbeknownst to you. Both of them were robbing you blind,” the video states.
Fraudulent unemployment, Medicaid, or Medicare claims can cause problems too, but as the narrator suggests, the “cumbersome bureaucracy” is often guilty of sending money to people who aren’t even alive anymore.
“Just to be clear, we are describing a scenario in which you earn money at your job, the government removes some of that money from your check, and then the government sends that money to a person who is not breathing and hasn’t been for a while,” the narrator quips.
Washington spends a lot of money: $4.4 trillion in 2019. And when you’re moving that kind of cash, it’s almost inevitable that some of it will end up in the wrong place.
How much? In 2020 alone, the federal government “lost” $67 billion to payments it should never have made. pic.twitter.com/ejxkNxaWqc
— Kite & Key Media (@kiteandkeymedia) May 4, 2021
This mismanagement, the video states, can not only cause waste but shorts others of the money they may need.
“It is worth noting that the victims here aren’t just taxpayers, it’s also the very people these programs are meant to assist because the same kinds of errors can result in the people the government is supposed to be helping actually getting underpaid,” the video explains.
The media group, which has an assortment of explainer videos, sees outrage over the federal squandering as a way to cultivate bipartisanship.
“Whether you’re a conservative Republican or a progressive Democrat, you can almost certainly think of better ways to use that money,” the video concluded. “$67 billion could put 335,000 new doctors at the VA, it could forgive student loans for over 2 million people, or it could build 11 border walls.”
