Porkulus: Potentially bad for your health

Swindlers, con men, and thieves could siphon off as much as $50 billion of the government's planned stimulus package as the money begins flooding the economy in coming months, according to David Williams, who runs Deloitte Financial Services Advisory and counsels clients on fraud prevention.

(Yawn) We can’t get too worked up over fraud in a government spending plan that is inherently fraudulent in nature to begin with. But do you know what does chap us a bit? We are siphoning off resources from the FBI and Treasury Department to track down fraud when when we’ve had a few incidents over the past couple of weeks that would suggest we have our law enforcement priorities misplaced.

The 9-11 attacks prompted the FBI and other government agencies to divert resources from financial fraud and other corporate crimes to fighting terrorism, including the transfer of 2,000 agents tracking white-collar crime to counterterrorism, Mueller said.

But now the focus is returning to white-collar crime and fraud in a big way.

Thankfully, we don’t have to worry about anything like terrorism or religious/political wackos shooting up the place anymore.

Obviously, the common sense solution here would be to cut-off the flow of the money that is the source of the fraudulent behavior (i.e. cancel porkulus as its not working anyway) and let our law enforcement people get back to catching the bad guys. Obviously, that is not going to happen.