The City of Philadelphia Is Checking Turkey Prices Instead of Balancing Its Checkbook

Here's a hilarious report from the Philadelphia Controller's office, published every November: “The Cost of Thanksgiving Dinner: $78.92 for a Family of Ten.”

The team probably spent about $20,000 of taxpayer money driving around checking the price tags of turkeys, cranberries and potatoes — to put out a report that no one reads.

Meanwhile, this is the exact same institutional bureaucracy that went years without reconciling its main bank accounts, resulting in $33 million in missing variance and nearly a billion dollars in undetected accounting errors. This is a fucking joke, not a “tragic misallocation of resources.”

But the turkey report? That comes out every November. Like clockwork.

The Controller's office is supposed to be the people who watch the store. Who find the waste. Who sound the alarm when something smells off.

They're supposed to be the watchdogs who protect the $7 BILLION budget of our tax money.

We all like to do fun things — but play comes after work, particularly when the School District of Philadelphia is running a $300 million structural deficit of its own. That same district just paid out $650,000 to settle a lawsuit over its selective-school admissions overhaul — I covered that in The $650K Settlement that Settles Nothing at Selective Philadelphia Schools.

I'm not saying the cost of food doesn't matter. I'm saying that you can't be dicking around tracking cranberry prices for fifty years, if you can't figure out your bank balance for three years on an $8B budget. The structural problem is laid out in The Controller's Office — a watchdog that can diagnose but not treat, that the Mayor decides whether to feed.

Accountability is priceless — and apparently not expected. On the plus side, we know the cost of that same dinner is up 291% since 1974.