Typical of the form is an item from the Wall Street…

““Typical of the form is an item from the Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire blog of June 24, 2013: The Social Security Administration’s inspector general on Monday said the agency improperly paid $31 million in benefits to 1,546 Americans believed to be deceased. And potentially making matters worse for the agency, the inspector general said the Social Security Administration had death certificate information on each person filed in the government database, suggesting it should have known the Americans had died and halted payments. Why do we allow this kind of thing to persist? The answer is simple—eliminating waste has a cost, just as getting to the airport early has a cost. Enforcement and vigilance are worthy goals, but eliminating all the waste, just like eliminating even the slightest chance of missing a plane, carries a cost that outweighs the benefit. As blogger (and former mathlete) Nicholas Beaudrot observed, that $31 million represents .004% of the benefits disbursed annually by the SSA. In other words, the agency is already extremely good at knowing who’s alive and who’s no more. Getting even better at that distinction, in order to eliminate those last few mistakes, might be expensive. If we’re going to count utils, we shouldn’t be asking, “Why are we wasting the taxpayer’s money?,” but “What’s the right amount of the taxpayer’s money to be wasting?” To paraphrase Stigler: if your government isn’t wasteful, you’re spending too much time fighting government waste.””

— Jordan Ellenberg