Tax dollars at work

According to the Economist Magazine, there is $60,000,000,000.00 (sixty billion) a year in Medicare claims fraud.

One third of this is in Florida, and a large percentage of this is by Cuban immigrants.

Interestingly, Cuba's annual GDP - Gross Domestic Product -  is less than this amount.

According to figures I looked up on the CIA World Factbook, ( https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/ )  120 countries have GDP's less than 60 billion. Two thirds of the countries IN THIS WORLD each generate less output than our Medicare program loses to theft!

(I want to add up the totals of the smallest countries' productivity until I reach sixty billion, but I do not have the time right now. (Tuvalu's - ranked at #190 - is only 15 Million. Belize's - ranked at #164 - is just 1.5 billion. Bolivia, at #102 is just 17.5 billion to give a few examples.)

Sounds like somebody is asleep at the wheel.

Behind the scenes...

Oh, the glamor of owning your own business, your own patents and holding the direction of your life in your own hands is a glorious thing!

Yeah, ok, sometimes.

But today I wrangled with the bank for hours (they basically only loan money to folks that already have money) and collected and pressed the most boring of all botanicals - the greenery (selaginella to be precise) that we need to decorate almost all of the luminaries we make. Cosmos flowers are fun because they LOOK LIKE the typical flower that a kid would draw in first grade. Azaleas are fine because they are first in the spring and there is a warmth and a promise in their aroma. but the "Sally-G" is an August afterthought. Sweating, March through July, plowing, planting, watering, picking, and pressing the daisies, pansies, Queen-Annes-lace, Johnnies, hydrangeas and the rest of the flowers inevitably becomes a job. It becomes a grimy, buggy, back rending repetitive job. Then you realize (about the time your fingernails wear through) that you still have to procure the background greenery that every floral Honeypot needs and you are actually only halfway through the pressing pressing requirements for the year (not counting, of course, the fall offerings of Japanese and sugar maples, ginkgoes and the like).

Ahh, the freedom!