I really should stop reading articles from news sources. Or maybe everyone else should start reading them—and take collective action. But alas, it seems impossible to get our government to perform at any level of efficiency or with any common sense. I would say that in general I’m an optimist and I believe our way of life is better than most places on earth. Having said that, I get more and more disgusted by our behemoth money-wasting black hole of a government every day.

The latest act of brilliance was discovered through an article on CBS Money Watch.com (http://t.co/d9SVQCN).

If you don’t want to read through the article just now, then you can read my take on the situation. Now we all love to hate the IRS for obvious reasons. I think I can express my own feelings via the awesome scene from the movie Stanger than Fiction that you can view below. (It’s just 21 seconds, c’mon, do it.)

Anyhoo, our favorite government agency, the IRS (note sarcasm in my tone), has been getting bamboozled by criminals. Convicted criminals currently residing in our lovely prisons are filing tax returns and getting millions in tax refunds. These inmates are not only living off of us (taxpayers that is) but they aren’t working, and therefore have no income to be taxed in the first place. We are literally paying criminals to hang out in our jail systems!

OMG.

If you could see me right now you’d see I am shaking my head and rolling my eyes and okay, I may have spit a little, too. But criminy people! Is it too much to expect that the tax returns of incarcerated individuals be examined more carefully? Evidently instead of checking criminals for criminal behavior, they check to make sure that poor people aren’t getting more than they deserve. Because you know they are the very people who don’t have money to pay someone to help them with their returns and they have so much that, geez, if we gave them any more we’d go broke while they spend the money on ridiculous things like food and clothing. Things that would maybe even spur the economy and create jobs. (Again, note sarcasm.) But I digress.

The article says that “Legislation has repeatedly been proposed to give the IRS access to the data [that they could use to help solve this problem], but so far, no go. What has kept Congress from acting—especially now with legislators frothing at the mouth for government cutbacks—I can’t begin to imagine.”

I can tell you why Congress won’t act. Because their cousins are the ones in jail ripping us off and feeding them with funds to back their campaigns. Okay, that claim has no factual evidence to back it up but hey, if they arrest me for slander, I can make a decent nest egg by filing for some tax refunds!

Get your heads out of the bureaucratic clouds taxman!

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