This week, thousands of people are getting stimulus checks in the mail. The problem is that a lot of them are dead. A Long Island woman was shocked when she checked the mail and received a letter from the U.S. Treasury -- but it wasn't for her.
The above story (h/t Drudge) is all over the news. The fact that the government sent out checks to dead people is a serious problem, but not the main problem.
The U.S government doesn't have accurate records of who we all are, nor should it. Unless we initiate contact with the government (to get a passport, a social security number, file our taxes, etc.) the government needs to mind its own business.
I'm fully aware that this hands-off/butt-out idea makes it very difficult when the government wants to do things like send out checks or gather other information, but that's just too damned bad. The Fourth Amendment hasn't been reversed. The government has no authority to keep lists like these. They are forbidden from doing so.
What is most concerning about these types of reports is that it lends an air of suspicion to other contact points. Are these long dead people showing up on voting rolls? Are there people getting Social Security or other entitlement checks in these people's names? Somehow these names got on a list, and we can only speculate on how that happened or the nefarious uses for those lists.
This is another reason why the government engaging in something like a blanket send of checks is such a bad idea (without first requiring that the citizens engage in a validation process to ensure that they are qualified to receive them). Obviously, the dead people receiving these checks didn't file a tax return and haven't qualified for Social Security either (for a long time). Why were they on the list?
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