Mississippi Swindle: Brett Favre and the Welfare Scandal that Shocked America turns out to answer some background questions on how American taxpayers ended up funding fake day cares. The author, Shad White, is the State Auditor of Mississippi. Phil Bryant, the governor at the time, received a insider’s tip that prompted an investigation by White’s team.
The root cause of the Mississippi fraud seems to be the same as the root cause of the Minnesota fraud: state officials allowed to make decisions about how to spend federal money. The author says that Clinton administration technocrats in D.C. were concerned that they’d destroyed the Black American family. Children born to “single mothers” went from roughly the same percentage as in the white population to over 60 percent (current data: 25 percent for whites; 65 percent to Blacks) in response to the Great Society “marry the government” programs introduced under Presidents FDR and Johnson, e.g., Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The Clinton geniuses implemented Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (“TANF”) in which states would get block grants and then could do whatever they wanted to with the money. They could, for example, give cash directly to “families” that didn’t work, but could also give money to nonprofit organizations that purported to assist those who didn’t work, e.g., by helping them write resumes or delivering other nebulous services.
The Mississippi DHS folks decided to give roughly 10 percent of the TANF funds to poor people and then 90 percent to friends’ nonprofit orgs whose executives spent the money on new houses, luxury vacations, kickbacks to state bureaucrats, etc. Only about $100 million was stolen from federal taxpayers, but the mechanism seems to be the same as in the much larger Minnesota fraud. The core prerequisites are (1) letting state officials decide how to spend federal money, and (2) the ability of officials to hand over taxpayer funds to nonprofit orgs.
There are some other good insights into the bureaucratic lifestyle. Some families in Mississippi living in $1 million houses and with six-figure incomes were enjoying Medicaid (an angel/VC-investor friend in a $2 million (pre-Biden dollars) house Maskachusetts was doing this about 15 years ago; he answered all of the questions on the Mass Health Connector accurately and the system kicked out that he was entitled to superlative MassHealth (Medicaid) coverage at $3/month). When the auditors pointed this out to the Medicaid bureaucrats their response was to push back rather than admit any bureaucratic errors or shortcomings. Even the people in the welfare bureaucracies who were corrupt or personally benefitting had a powerful desire to obstruct auditing and to preserve business as usual.
I’m almost done with the book and so far there isn’t a single example of a person who lost his or her job as a consequence for incompetence. A handful of people suffered criminal convictions, but nobody lost a day of wages as punishment for taxpayers losing $100 million.
If you don’t want to read the book, Wikipedia offers a summary.
Loosely related, a thoughtful perspective from U.S. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana:
Also, pronouns and goats in Minneapolis:
Suppose a homeless person comes up to you and says, “Spare some Jacksons? I’m hungry.” Its far more effective to offer to buy them lunch, if you are concerned about their hunger, than to give them $20. Someone who is grifting probably won’t interrupt their revenue stream with the opportunity cost lost to lunch. A hungry addict will get fed instead of a fix. The issue in this posting really is just a matter of scale.
I once offered a panhandler who claimed that he needed to eat, healthy food that I wrapped to go. He refused, he wanted burgers and fries. Later I had seen in DC, homeless begged on side of the road and some cars were giving them McDonald paper bags
@perplexed
Shrug, they were junk food junkies, a fix is a fix. I guess it’s not surprising that beggars can be choosers in modern times.
Apparently we are way past believing “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”. Give a man/woman/non-binary a therapy goat…
I was in Boston Back Bay back in 1999. I was taking my bottles for recycling, on the way a beggar asked for money, and I offered my bottles as a donation (must a been at least 6 bucks in total) but they turned it down in disgust.
I remember a lot of old foreigners (chinese?) collecting bottles and cans for recycling in Boston. Maybe to supplement their pensions 🙁
My employer just hired a Russian-born female (35 y/o, FSU, BS Computer Science grad) for a mid-level Systems Analyst job (at $65K, east cost of FL, 60 miles from Orlando). She’s been in the US 15 years and speaks and understand English perfectly. She advised that in Russia and the US there are classes to teach Russians how to scam the Russian and US governments. And that most Russian wealth in Russia and the US is obtained via scams including, and especially, that of the Russians in NYC and Sunny Isles Beach, FL.
wow, $65K/year, great money in Soviet (and Putin’s) Russia.
Did Brin, Koum, Blavatnik attended those classes? I did not know that. Ask her where I can sign up.
Also, you can google former Soviet countries emigres in the US. If you believe google, since it is a half-Russian emigre.