A recent study in the U.S. shows that singles are on the increase...

Yet they continue to pay for programs that are exclusively geared toward families.

Billions upon billions are being spent on child benefit programs each year, but no one seems to know how much.

This isn’t surprising, since they are divided among so many jurisdictions that it is difficult if not impossible to track down. (see http://gerry-stopthebull.blogspot.ca/2014/06/tales-from-nanny-nation.html for a miniscule list.) These range from a basic $1,300 per year, non-conditional grant ,to the so-called “No One’s Perfect” -- a federally-sponsored grant for underage parents.

Bear in mind that this doesn’t include education, which in my Ontario community amounts to 72% on the annual tax bill. Multiply this by every school district across Canada, and you are probably talking trillions of dollars per year.

Yet, there is NO aggregate accounting per province, LITTLE co-ordination between provincial and federal programs (which frequently duplicate one another), and NO cost/benefit analysis for any of it. So, who knows whether the money being spent is even achieving the goals for which it was intended?

Or is it, as I suspect, largely a black hole.

It is, from my perspective, the sloppiest handling of major amounts of taxpayer’s money that I can think of -- perhaps rivaling the arms industry for unaccountability.