Dead Men Don't Farm

They do, however, receive subsidies from the Department of Agriculture according to a recent GAO investigation that discovered that, as Mark Micheli at Government Executive writes:

… three USDA agencies had made $36 million in improper payments to 6,336 dead people between 2008 and 2012.

This is, when you think about it, logical and inevitable and somewhat poetic. The government’s agricultural programs were once famous for paying farmers not to grow crops. And then there were programs aimed at getting redundant farmers off the land. This is so much cleaner and more elegant.