What's the Matter With Indiana?

Their state government is populated with a bunch of morons, apparently:

Indiana officials have found $288 million in tax payments sitting unnoticed in a state holding account.

Gov. Mitch Daniels announced the discovery Tuesday morning. He said that because of a software programming error, that money — collected since 2007 from businesses that paid their corporate income taxes using e-checks — was not being shifted into Indiana’s general fund.

The Republican governor called it a happy error.

Sorry, but I have to take issue with your assessment there, Mitch. It was a stupendously idiotic error. Here are a few more details:

“The software programmer who modernized the rest of the system did not write the necessary code to routinely, automatically sweep the money from one account to the general fund,” Daniels said.

Therefore, Indiana budget officials were not aware the money was there, and had not been including it in their revenue reports.

“It was an imperceptible amount at first, and it grew over time,” Daniels said. He noted that even he eventually came to believe the state’s corporate tax collections seemed too low.

So in other words, the software programmer could have routed the money into his own offshore account and jetted off to some third world country where they don't have an extradition treaty with the United States, and you dumbasses would have been out over a quarter of a billion taxpayer dollars. In light of this colossal stupidity and Governor Daniels's lame attempt to laugh it off, I hereby respectfully suggest that the name of Indiana's capital city henceforth be changed from Indianapolis to Idiocracy.


Bonus: The boys from The Bottle Rockets and their snarky tribute to Indianapolis