[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 8]
[House]
[Pages 11047-11048]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        GOVERNMENT INCOMPETENCE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Texas (Mr. Poe) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. POE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, Indiana prison inmate Ryan Greminger 
collected unemployment benefits during his 2-year sentence in the 
county jail for a drug crime. He collected $14,000 of taxpayer money. 
He was in jail, and the government continued to pay him anyway.
  Only in America would we pay people in jail because they are 
unemployed. Greminger should not have obtained money from honest 
American taxpayers, but he did.
  Government is becoming incompetent when it comes to paying 
unemployment benefits. According to CNN, the Federal Government 
overpaid $14 billion in unemployment benefits just last year. That 
means 11 percent of all jobless benefits paid out were not supposed to 
be paid to those individuals. Those overpayments that should have gone 
to people in need were sent by government to those who didn't deserve 
any money. You see, not all payments are to honest people who are 
looking for jobs and are out of work.
  Inmate Greminger's case is bad, but there's more.
  A convicted killer, murderer, in a California prison was receiving at 
least $30,000 in unemployment checks. The murderer made sure that his 
family and his friends cashed his checks while he was locked up. So 
each month, his family fraudulently cashed his $1,600 check, which they 
would then deposit in his jail bank account. Guess where it went next, 
Mr. Speaker? He shared the jail money with some of his low-life prison 
gang members while he was in the joint.
  There's more.
  The Federal Government reportedly sent a man $515,000 in payments 
over 37 years--37 years, Mr. Speaker--because he was supposedly 
unemployed. Thirty-seven years of unemployment benefits for anyone is 
nonsense to me, but who exactly were they sending that money to in this 
case? A dead person who died 40 years ago. No wonder he wasn't working, 
Mr. Speaker; he wasn't around.
  We count on our government to spend our tax dollars wisely, but it is 
inefficiently sending money to those not qualified to obtain taxpayer 
support--prison inmates and dead people.
  Fourteen billion dollars is a lot of money in anybody's book. In the 
private sector, if a business misappropriated $14 billion, the people 
in charge would be fired or go to jail, but not so with government 
agencies. These overpayments and wasteful incompetent spending really 
don't shock or surprise Americans anymore at all. There's so much waste 
of taxpayer money that we have become accustomed to it, and we actually 
expect government to waste money--too big, too wasteful, too 
incompetent, and too inefficient.
  But the real problem is not waste, but the size and inefficiency of 
government. We're moving to a society that is just another European 
nanny state, where government is bigger, bloated, and controlling. The 
government says it will provide all our needs if we just turn over more 
power, authority, and money to government and government agencies.
  Mr. Speaker, does anybody ever really get warm fuzzies when we hear 
about government programs like the post office, FEMA, the IRS, or TSA? 
I don't think so. Government doesn't do things better; it does things 
more expensively and wastefully. And government promotes a concept of 
more dependence on government, not independence.
  We in Congress need to realize the obvious--that unlimited, out-of-
control government is not the answer to our problems. But until we get 
a grip on government and move to a constitutional concept of limited 
government, we should expect and demand more accountability from the 
people that are in charge of the people's money.
  With hard economic times affecting the unemployed, we cannot tolerate 
wasteful spending by government bureaucracies. With 8.5 percent 
unemployment nationwide, 11 percent in the

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Hispanic community, 14 percent in the African American community, 14 
percent for returning military from Iraq and Afghanistan, and 50 
percent unemployment for recent college graduates, we should demand 
that when government helps those we as a society say it should help, 
government does so properly and efficiently and in a dignified way. 
Otherwise, more dead people will continue to receive taxpayer money 
that should go to people that are at least alive.
  And that's just the way it is.

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