[117] in libertarians
EVI-news-bits
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vernon Imrich)
Thu Aug 18 14:30:47 1994
Date: Thu, 18 Aug 94 14:20:52 -0400
From: vimrich@flying-cloud.mit.edu (Vernon Imrich)
To: vimrich@flying-cloud.mit.edu
Cc: libertarians@MIT.EDU
From: turf@gelac.lasc.lockheed.com (Brian McInturff)
Subject: News of the Weird Government
To: libernet@Dartmouth.EDU
Since traffic has been light lately on the libernet, thought y'all
would enjoy this:
Lead Story
* The Boston Globe reported in February that Eulalia Rodriguez and her
extended family receive government assistance payments totaling nearly
$1 million a year. Rodriguez, who has been on public assistance for 26
years, has 14 children on welfare, 74 grandchildren, and 15
great-grandchildren. Said she, "I'm sick of people acting like I'm some
crook. We've got a lot of kids to feed." Rodriguez lives in a
six-bedroom, three-story apartment in a gated Boston community called
Harbor Point. [Boston Globe, 2-20-94]
Government in Action
* In March the Providence Journal-Bulletin reported that the Internal
Revenue Service office in Rhode Island was specializing in pursuing tax
underpayments by pizza parlors. The office calculated a standard amount
of flour in a pizza, divided that by the total flour the restaurant
purchased, found the number of pizzas made, and then determined the
likely income of the store, which was often more than what the store
reported. [Providence Journal-Bulletin, 3-1-94]
* Reading, Pa., Fire Department official Michael J. Moyer was suspended
for a day on October 12 for having violated a directive not to drive
his Department car in the town's Labor Day parade. Moyer was thus not
paid for his regular 8 a.m.-6 p.m. shift, but the person called in to
replace him, at overtime pay, had to vacate his own subsequent shift,
and according to regulations, the person who had to fill that later
shift, also at overtime pay, was Michael J. Moyer, who thus earned $313
instead of the $155 he would have made had he not been suspended.
[Reading Eagle, 10-23-93]
* On March 8, the New York City Division of School Facilities finally
attached doors to the stalls in the girls' restroom at Public School
206 in Brooklyn, following years of complaining by the principal. The
doors were requisitioned on May 25, 1989 -- 1,747 days earlier. [New York
Post, 3-9-94]
* Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review of federal
government practices revealed recently that the Pentagon spends $4.3
billion a year on travel -- $2.0 billion for the travel itself and $2.3
billion to process the paperwork. [AP wirecopy, 4-26-94]
* In April, a Senate subcommittee found that the number of drug and
alcohol addicts who had signed up for benefits under the Supplemental
Security Income program for the "disabled" had tripled in three years,
in large part because the government does not verify whether the
benefits are spent on addiction counseling or merely to buy more drugs.
A quarter of a million addicts receive $1.4 billion a year under the
program. In Cleveland, Ohio, sheriff's deputies disclosed in January
that 91 of the 330 fugitives rounded up during stings in 1993 were on
welfare -- receiving an average of $330 a month. Regulations prohibit
cross-checking fugitives' records with welfare records. [Washington
Times, 4-29-94; AP wirecopy, 1-10-94; ]
* Among the projects cited in an April Denver Post article on the 10
"worst ideas in modern U. S. environmental history": a plan by a
Department of the Interior official in the 1960s to flood the Grand
Canyon for a hydroelectric plant; a plan by then-Atomic Energy
Commission chairman James Schlesinger to dispose of nuclear waste by
shooting it into the sun on a space shuttle; and the World Health
Organization's 1960s program to kill mosquitoes on Borneo with U.S.-made
DDT, which so disrupted the food chain that the island was soon overrun
with rats, until the U. S. parachuted in cats to control them. [[Denver
Post, Apr94]]
* At a Jacksonville, Fla., City Council discussion of new park sites
recently, a councilman told a councilwoman that she could "kiss my
posterior," and she responded by threatening to "beat the hell" out of
him. [American City & County, February 1994]
