Your government at work.

The sagacious six-month-old gnaws his fingers contemplatively, wondering . . .

Where do those tax dollars go?

Nathaniel is covered by Missouri Health Net (Medicare). MHN has decided that women on MHN are either too poor or too stupid to buy a few books to help them out with their newborns, so they give them 13 little booklets with information about a newborn baby, a one month old, and so on through the first 12 months.

And here's what Nathaniel got into the mail yesterday: the books for a newborn and the first month.

Turns out, Tracy was already given the full set of 13. So, it would seem that, for the next eleven months, we're going to receive eleven more booklets, six months late, duplicating what we already have. Additionally, every time Tracy or Nathaniel gets an MHN letter, they invariably get a second, identical letter a few days later.

What I want to know is, why can't the young mother just receive a letter in the mail with directions to the nearest public library and the url for Google Search? There's hundreds of times more information to be found in those sources than in these little books, and it'd save the government some money while they were at it.