Perhaps we’re now living in a bailout society. You know, if Uncle Sam is handing out money, why not grab some?

Or, perhaps, more ordinary Americans are taking a page from Wall Street executives whose career paths often seem to include a side trip to federal prison.

Or, maybe there are just more petty thieves in our midst than we ever imagined.

At any rate, we applaud the passage last week of The Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act, intended to recover the estimated $98 billion of federal money lost each year to improper payments.

For comparison purposes, the war in Afghanistan is costing us about $100 billion per year, so it’s shocking to see a nearly equal amount of what retailers euphemistically call “shrinkage” from government coffers.

The new legislation is timely, coming on the heels of revelations last week that 14,100 tax filers wrongly received at least $26.7 million in first-time homebuyer credits or payments.

One home was used 67 times for claims. In other cases, children received checks for selling homes. People who bought homes before the program started got checks, as did people who never bought a home at all but said they did.

Finally, nearly 1,300 prison inmates got first-time homebuyer money. They are, after all, criminals with creative minds and time on their hands.

The Internal Revenue Service says it is trying to get the money back, but that is likely to be difficult and expensive. The thieves likely have already spent the money or have moved on.

A certain amount of fraud accompanies every federal program. The thievery in the Medicaid and Medicare programs is legendary.

And the government assistance programs for hurricanes Catrina and Rita were widely looted by people who suffered no damage at all.

Now you can bet your bottom dollar that cheats and swindlers are already lining up to pilfer the $20 billion fund BP has set up to pay claims for the Gulf Coast oil spill.

Administrator Kenneth Feinberg will have his hands full trying to separate the legitimate and fraudulent claims.

It’s worth noting that bogus claims represented less than one half of one percent of the money paid out under the first-time homebuyer program,

On the other hand, the program was inundated with 400,000 questionable claims that were rejected for payment and 150 criminals cases have been launched as a result.

And nobody knows how many hucksters applied for money, got it and are secretly enjoying their stolen money. Maybe another 100,000?

That would mean nearly a half million Americans saw an opportunity to cheat their government and seized it.

Most of us may be good, honest, god-fearing people, but there are certainly a lot of thieves among us.

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