A Republican just got me free money! Yes, this needs some explaining...
So I noticed the below pasted video sitting in my YouTube feed and having seen this rather amusing senator before, I thought it'd be worth a couple minutes to hear what he had to say about how the government should "give back unredeemed savings bonds." I thought, "Oh, this should be good. How's a Republican going to advocate that the government give ordinary folk their money back?"
Well, if you watch, this guy does have a very Mr. Southern Cracker Goes To Washington way about him. In fact, just listening to him speak, without the context of his words, and you'd be remise to think, if it were some half century ago, that he wouldn't be some old school Deep South Dixiecrat with the soft strains of "Suwannee River" playin' in the background while he sips on some fine Kentucky bourbon. But in fact, he's a hardline Trump goose-steppin' bootlicker, well, except for his somewhat critical comment last week when he said the president should have, as a wise man once said, "just said nothing" when it came to the urge to tweet about the Reiner murder.
But this speech of his on the floor of the Senate indeed has him pitching the idea that the Treasury Department return all the unclaimed savings bonds that have been sitting around for more than the thirty year maximum in which interest accrues since the owners of those bonds get no investment incentive anymore and in most cases have either forgotten about the bonds or they have died [and those inheriting the estates likely didn't know about the bonds in order to claim them.]
In the rather good explanation of how this unclaimed money could effectively be returned, he explains that the states each have a system in place already whereby unclaimed money, held usually by a business, often as a result of a deposit that's been unreturned, can be searched and claimed by legitimate owners. He said that anyone can go to their state's website and type in their own information to see if they are owed any forgotten money.
You know, I did know about these sites and I had searched them many years ago both here and Rhode Island. Back then, nothing. I don't know when I last did that prior search, but it must have been more than a decade ago.
Here's what I found tonight:
