Our tax dollars at work- Criminals paid to babysit

This story out of the Sacramento Bee should anger anyone who reads it. In 2004 2,200 people with criminal backgrounds were paid by the state of California to babysit children of welfare recipients. Among those 2,200 are people who have abused their own children.

Just one more example of governmental incompetence. There is no excuse for this, most of our public officials have no regard for anything but their careers and themselves. I'll repeat what I've said on this blog before, the American public one day will rise up in arms against a government that protects the guilty and punishes the innocent. We need to take back our government before people pay with their lives for bureaucratic stupidity like this.

State has paid criminals to baby-sit
Workers sometimes start months before background checks are complete.

The Kern County woman told local officials up front that she was in court-ordered abuse counseling and that child-protection workers had taken away her three children.

Yet, for months the state has been paying the woman to care for the children of someone else: a participant in California's welfare-to-work program, CalWORKS.

A state-paid baby sitter for another Kern County CalWORKS participant is on probation for nine counts of willful cruelty to her own children.

California also has been paying people arrested on murder and attempted murder charges to watch the children of welfare recipients, state workers say.

In 2004, state records show, nearly 2,200 people with criminal backgrounds that disqualified them from watching children served as child-care providers for welfare recipients in California for up to a year before state officials cut them off.

It's a problem that has persisted for years with no solution in sight.

Since the state pays the cost of child care for welfare recipients who are working, California law requires caregivers who earn welfare funds to have a clean criminal record or to get an exemption from the state.

Sixty percent of new welfare recipients leave their children with unlicensed providers - usually a friend or relative. But unlike workers at bigger child-care centers, unlicensed caregivers who watch children from only one family start getting paid before their criminal background checks are complete.

And because of bureaucratic delays in Trustline, the state's background-check program for unlicensed child-care workers, a criminal-history investigation can take months to finish.

The state stops paying people who've committed crimes only after their background checks are complete and their appeals have been exhausted.