During the time when Americans cared about opioids (see Who funded America’s opiate epidemic? You did.), the scapegoats for the mostly taxpayer-funded problem were Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family that owned Purdue Pharma (also scapegoated: members of the Sackler family who had no ownership or management role in Purdue Pharma!). Seldom vilified in the press:
- Medicaid bureaucrats who enabled the addictions by paying for opioids in spectacular numbers
- FDA bureaucrats who approved additional uses for opioid pills
- Johnson & Johnson, which grew and imported the raw materials for opioid pills (and also sold some of its own pills to compete with Purdue Pharma)
- DEA bureaucrats who approved the importation of opium raw materials in growing and spectacular quantities
- Pill distributors and pharmacies
Taxpayers who followed the headlines would learn that the U.S. had a near-perfect system, but that there was one bad apple within the perfect system. Once Purdue and the evil Sacklers were shut down we could get back to business as usual at Medicaid, FDA, DEA, J&J, CVS, etc.
I wonder if Tim Walz and his merry band of check-writers in Minnesota are the new Purdue Pharma/Sacklers. The U.S. welfare system is perfectly engineered for fraud, it seems, with state bureaucrats having the authority to spend federal money. Any system without a massive fraud incentive would start with state bureaucrats spending only state taxpayer money and local government employees spending only local taxes. (Imagine a bureaucrat in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He/she/ze/they would reasonably approve 100 percent of residents for SNAP/EBT because the money is coming from the federal treasury and will grow the Cambridge economy. The same bureaucrat would have an incentive to approve 100 percent of residents for state-funded programs since only a small fraction of state taxpayers live in Cambridge.)
What if fraud levels are nearly as high in some other states, but people who benefit from the U.S. running the world’s second largest welfare state (percentage of GDP; maybe we are #1 now after the coronapanic enhancements?) don’t want peasant taxpayers to look into the situation? It would then be ideal to scapegoat the Minnesotans and their Somali brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters. Once a handful of Somalis in Minnesota have been sent off to Club Fed (they’ll live at taxpayer expense for a few years as punishment for previously living at taxpayer expense), everyone can assume that the problem is solved because the bad apples (bad guavas?) have been removed from the welfare state barrel.
Vaguely related…
I have heard of counties where a lot of the population is collecting disability. And no one seems to worried about some environmental cause. So yes, I think that there is systemic fraud going on in a lot of places, and a lot of people have to know about it.
Whistleblower Hearing: https://youtu.be/h3d1nsq3fxA?t=232
There are reportedly upwards of 1000 whistleblowers in Minnesota, but Walz administration has been aggressive about retaliating against them, threatening their jobs, homes, and children.
The question is whether this behavior is universal everywhere that welfare fraud takes place, or if there is something specific to Somali ethnic affinity fraud and the Walz administration.
It is interesting how “everyone knows” about these scams, from opiate mills to robo-signing mortgages to fake daycares. The incentives punish anyone who speaks up, until it is too big to ignore.
“I have heard of counties where a lot of the population is collecting disability.”
I read somewhere that something like 50% of working-age adults in Puerto Rico are collecting SS disability.
I wonder what percent of US GDP is government spending lost on fraud and scams. It’s got to be more than a couple of percent.