Dan Mitchell recently appeared on MSNBC to explain why we should not be surprised to learn that more than $9 million dollars in home buyer tax credits were given to prison inmates who were clearly not new home owners.  This kind of waste is to be expected when Congress writes a 70,000+ page tax code that no one can understand, full of loopholes, credits or other goodies, and then expects a bunch of government bureaucrats to carry it out competently.

A simple flat tax, without all the complicated credits and other carve-outs that politicians slip into the current code, would largely eliminate this kind of waste.