Monday, 12 December 2011

The Cost

Some folks sat down and looked a Rod Blagojevich and the eventual cost to the nation.  As he runs off to prison....we (regular tax payers), will pay $25,378 a year to safely tend to his sentence in prison.

We end up with a bill for at least a quarter of a feed, house, and guard Blago.

At some point in six years....we also end up paying him $15k a year as his pension for being a congressman.

The sad thing is that it's a waste of time and money.  It would have been simpler to just send Blago off to house-arrest and mandate he stay in his house twenty hours a public contact, no speeches, no travel.  Instead, we simply increase the prison population by another body, and feed the guy three square meals a day.

It would have been just as fair to just force Blago to quarantine himself for a decade and not speak to reporters.  But we can't cross the line to realize the type of characters that ought to be in prison.