All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[PaulBullion]

Attachment 97935

I can see how this would make them anxious. Even I would have been confused and concerned if I walked into that garage and saw it, and I'm not Black.

Definitely a noose.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Attachment 97935

I can see how this would make them anxious. Even I would have been confused and concerned if I walked into that garage and saw it, and I'm not Black.

THAT, is most definitely a noose. No doubt whatsoever.

[Dalak]

Sadly, that is a noose

I know the elections are 540 months away still, but these polls won't help to improve Trump's foul mood:

My company does some work for Sienna, and considering the work I put in to be impartial regardless of who's taking the survey I'm happy about the results.

It was a 7-2 decision.

https://apnews.com/d773ac5bdd0ac3eed...ign=SocialFlow

If Hillary Clinton had won the White House, it would be likely be a 6-3 decision because Kennedy would still be on the court.

That's assuming this case would even have been brought to the SCOTUS under a Clinton presidency.

Considering the out of character votes from conservatives in some of the last few decisions, my theory is that a little back door dealing is taking place with votes from both sides.

Dead people got $1 billion in COVID-19 stimulus checks, watchdog says

Yet the Trump administration fights oversight and fights Congress at every step on trying to do its duty calling the Agency heads to account and looking into where all these trillions in money is going. If it wasn't for the media looking into this and digging into following the money we wouldn't have a clue where all the waste and fraud is going.

But, we are supposed to worry about non existent voter fraud by expanding mail voting to protect citizens. They whine up and down about that with 0 evidence. But, then fight having to explain and make sure the money allocated for Covid relief is going to where it should.

With all the sketchy loans and now these checks to dead people, I wonder how much they could even try to recoup?

[Tami]

The Dixie Chicks are now The Chicks, having dropped the Dixie part from their name. Also, they just released a protest song.

[JCAll]

Dead people got $1 billion in COVID-19 stimulus checks, watchdog says



Yet the Trump administration fights oversight and fights Congress at every step on trying to do its duty calling the Agency heads to account and looking into where all these trillions in money is going. If it wasn't for the media looking into this and digging into following the money we wouldn't have a clue where all the waste and fraud is going.

But, we are supposed to worry about non existent voter fraud by expanding mail voting to protect citizens. They whine up and down about that with 0 evidence. But, then fight having to explain and make sure the money allocated for Covid relief is going to where it should.

Hearing that makes me feel even worse for never even getting one. Just nobody knows what they're doing.

[worstblogever]

Hearing that makes me feel even worse for never even getting one. Just nobody knows what they're doing.

They sent them to dead people before they woul Puerto Ricans or people who married immigrants.

[The Cool Thatguy]

Hearing that makes me feel even worse for never even getting one. Just nobody knows what they're doing.

Sadly, I think we're all lucky that Trump's people have little idea how to actually work the government

[shooshoomanjoe]

It's been a long time since I've seen republicans call themselves the party of family values or mention how moral they are. I guess they realize there's no point in keeping the facade with trump leading them.

[PaulBullion]

It's been a long time since I've seen republicans call themselves the party of family values or mention how moral they are. I guess they realize there's no point in keeping the facade with trump leading them.

OTOH they still claim to be the party of LAW AND ORDER more than 3 years after putting an organized crime family in charge of the country.

[mogwen]

No surprise, right?

Speaking of which, there's a drive-thru/walk-up testing site literally right around the corner from my street. It's been in operation for close to a couple of months now, I walk by there every weekday on my lunch break, some days, it's busy as heck, other days, not so much, but it's been there for the less well off in my neighborhood. I can't imagine what would happen if it were to shut down.

Of course, no surprise for me. But others are in the middle of a rude awakening, I think.

[MyriVerse]

They sent them to dead people before they woul Puerto Ricans or people who married immigrants.

What about dead Puerto Ricans?

[Mister Mets]

Dead people got $1 billion in COVID-19 stimulus checks, watchdog says



Yet the Trump administration fights oversight and fights Congress at every step on trying to do its duty calling the Agency heads to account and looking into where all these trillions in money is going. If it wasn't for the media looking into this and digging into following the money we wouldn't have a clue where all the waste and fraud is going.

But, we are supposed to worry about non existent voter fraud by expanding mail voting to protect citizens. They whine up and down about that with 0 evidence. But, then fight having to explain and make sure the money allocated for Covid relief is going to where it should.

You can prioritize speed, or absolute accuracy. You can't get both at the same time.

Matt O'Brien, an Economics Affairs reporter, sums it up.

This is innumeracy masquerading as accountability.

$1.4 billion out of $269 billion—a 0.5% error rate—going to people it shouldn’t have really isn’t that big a deal for money that had to get out the door immediately.

Why do some newspapers love stories about things like dead people getting checks? Because it lets them look they're holding power accountable without being ideological.

Everyone, after all, can agree that dead people shouldn't be getting money...

The question, though, is how big a problem this really is. Readers need context. Dollar figures don't give it, since any level of waste in a $20 trillion economy is going to sound huge compared to a single family's income.

Take this front-page story from 2013 about Social Security paying out $133 million to dead people over the previous few years. That sounds bad until you realize, as @DeanBaker13 pointed out, that this meant just 0.006% of its benefits went to dead people.

The real point is that these kind of stories actually *aren't* non-ideological. If you breathlessly report that a 99.994% success rate means that the government is stupidly wasting your money, you're playing into anti-government talking points while also misinforming readers.

Jordan Weissmann of Slate made a similar point.

Who Cares if the IRS Sent Stimulus Checks to Dead People?
This isn’t the scandal journalists are making it out to be.

So it turns out the federal government sent more than 1 million coronavirus relief payments to dead people. That’s according to a report released Thursday by the Government Accountability Office, which earned some breathless coverage from the Washington Post describing the “revelation” as a problem of “astonishing scope.”

In fact, it’s anything but. The IRS has sent out more than 160 million economic impact payments, worth $269.3 billion since Congress passed the CARES Act in March. Out of all those direct deposits, checks, and debit cards, the GAO says that 1.1 million—or 0.4 percent of the total, worth about $1.4 billion—went to individuals who are deceased. We are quite literally talking about a rounding error that appears to have been the product of Washington’s efforts to get money to Americans as quickly as possible in the middle of an economic and public health disaster. The Post writes, “The report makes clear how, in the mad dash to pass legislation to prop up an economy in free-fall in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic, mistakes were made.” But even calling this a “mistake” is a stretch, given that the alternative was to slow down the process of delivering much-needed aid.

Here’s what appears to have happened. The IRS was required to send stimulus payments out to Americans based on the information contained in either their 2018 or 2019 tax returns. According to the GAO, the IRS’s lawyers determined that it “did not have legal authority to deny payments to those who filed a return for 2019, even if they were deceased at the time of payment.” Technically, they could have used the Social Security Administration’s death records to double-check whether people who filed a tax return for 2018, but not 2019, were still alive. But they decided not to for the sake of speed.

This approach wasn’t even without precedent. To fulfill the CARES Act’s mandate to deliver payments as “rapidly as possible,” the GAO explains, “Treasury officials said Treasury and IRS used many of the operational policies and procedures developed in 2008 for the stimulus payments, and therefore did not use the death records as a filter to halt payments to decedents in the first three batches of payments.” Eventually, the Treasury and IRS reversed course and concluded that, actually, they did have the legal power to deny checks to dead people, and started verifying that recipients were alive in their fourth batch of payments.

On the Richter scale of public policy failures, this one barely registers; I am pretty sure the republic is going to survive if a few widows got a preloaded debit card with $1,200 that was meant for their dead husbands.

[Mister Mets]

Definitely a noose.

What was the point of the noose in October, when that was not Bubba Wallace's garage?

[kidfresh512]

You can prioritize speed, or absolute accuracy. You can't get both at the same time.

Matt O'Brien, an Economics Affairs reporter, sums it up.



Jordan Weissmann of Slate made a similar point.

The problem is the trump administration actively fighting against oversight and accountability. If we had that unchecked and can get the money back its not a big deal. What is a big deal is when the money goes out and the agencies responsible don't respond to oversight. What companies got loans. Should they have gotten the loans based on criteria? Media has helped get some of the companies that maybe technically qualified but had other ways of getting capital and thus were taking money from small businesses without the resources.

All this article proves is that accountability and oversight and investigative reporting MATTER.

[Celgress]

I don't know if I should cry or laugh. I doubt they meant anything malicious, still, it was offensive and they've demanded others be "canceled" for similar occurrences in the past.