One of the U.S. taxpayers has been slapped with a $10,000 fine for errors on their quarterly returns over a period of 3 years. The same error was repeated 12 times, shorting the Treasury each time. The error was made by an accountant, as we might expect after all the accounting scandals in the news, and here we are offended by yet another. Have those accountants no shame?... no sense of public responsibility?

In this shameful case, the error was in the amount of $3.25, and was repeated over and over as if to say "I got away with it once... might as well push it to the limit. Well, our friends at the IRS finally had enough, after 3 years, and nailed the dastardly cheats!

The culprits turned out to be one of Nebraska's few remaining one-room schools, Hill Public School, in Bayard, which has 8 students. As reported by the Kansas City Star:

The IRS informed the school district of the discrepancy on June 1, 2003, and wants the fine to be paid, Rhonda Maxcy, school board secretary, said Monday. The school is even trying to raise $2,000 from the sale of its 1985 Chevy van, which takes its eight students in Kindergarten through 8th grade on field trips. To make the problem worse, the state has cut $10,000 from the school's budget.

Now, $3.25 may not seem like much, but I got out my spreadsheet and calculated the gross overall effect of lost income, including interest, that our government suffered. If we assume a 2% quarterly loss of interest (that's 8.24% annually) over 3 years, the total shortage to our government was not merely $39, but a whopping $44.46.

The 2005 U.S. budget is $2.4 trillion.  That's $2,400,000,000,000 (only about $364 billion more than they expect to take in). My bank calls that an overdrawn account, but the feds call it a "deficit". Ain't that a cute idea?

Still in my spreadsheet, I decided to calculate just how much that Hill Public School scandal would affect our government. There are 31,536,000 seconds in a year, which means that our government spends $76,103.50 each second, or $76.10 every millisecond, which means that our felonious taxpayer, in effect, shut down our government for OVER HALF A MILLISECOND.

This is a story that illustrates so well how out of control our federal government is that I'm not even going to elaborate on it... except to point out that what happened to tiny Hill Public School could easily happen to you too.

Once upon a time, we, the people, were important to our government, but those days are long gone. Now we are all just numbers... and votes... "resources" to be drained and manipulated for political gain. It doesn't have to be that way, but it will never get any better until most of us decide that we're just not going to take it any longer.