Authorities in any respect ranges is mainly broke, particularly in blue states.
Authorities leaders’ chief answer to this poverty appears usually to contain extracting more cash from the citizenry.
However the place does the cash they’ve already extracted go?
Primarily based on what’s turning up in Minnesota, a lot of it will political cronies — who then recycle money again to the identical politicians who obtained it for them.
Final week unbiased journalist Nick Shirley did what any mainstream journalist might have finished, however didn’t.
He discovered a listing of Somali-run “day care” establishments funded by the state, then visited them to see what sort of care they had been providing.
The reply is, the sort with no precise children.
In all, Shirley recognized roughly $110 million value of fraud.
These establishments had been supposedly visited by state inspectors — who typically famous violations, however didn’t word that the entire thing was a rip-off. (One among these “academic” services even misspelled “studying” on its signage.)
Shirley’s massively viral video — with 116 million views and counting — impressed others to dig into political donation information.
Positive sufficient, recipients of the daycare funding had been making massive donations to, you guessed it, Democratic politicians.
First to come back beneath scrutiny is Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who represents the district the place most of the scams — which can have siphoned off a staggering $9 billion — are centered.
Omar’s venture-capitalist husband is quietly scrubbing his web site of key officer particulars as questions develop over how the congresswoman out of the blue acquired a $30 million fortune.
Now Gov. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ bumbling 2024 operating mate, is beginning to get some robust questions.
John Hinderaker, whose Minnesota-based Middle for the American Experiment suppose tank has been on prime of this fraud story for years, explains this scandal isn’t precisely new.
A decade in the past the FBI investigated Somali child-care fraudsters for opening daycare facilities with no children and accumulating state cash for fictitious youngsters.
“Quite a lot of Somalis went to jail, nevertheless it didn’t deter others from finishing up comparable frauds, on a grander scale,” Hinderaker wrote on his PowerLine weblog.
Walz, who was in Congress when the final batch of Somali rip-off artists confronted costs, can’t be blind to this historical past.
Does this imply Tim Walz goes to jail? Unlikely.
“Did Tim Walz know the frauds had been occurring?” Hinderaker asks. “After all. Even Walz isn’t that silly.
“However absent taking bribes, of which there’s zero proof, he has not dedicated against the law.”
In all probability appropriate.
The FBI is surging investigators to Minnesota seeking extra fraud — and director Kash Patel says what we’ve seen to date simply the “tip of a really massive iceberg.”
Maybe high-level officers will sometime face costs.
However till then, this scandal leaves extra inquiries to be addressed.
First, with Walz on the Democratic presidential ticket in 2024, why did no nationwide or native “mainstream” journalists look into all this?
Given the earlier prosecutions, the background of a state’s governor on a nationwide ticket needs to be a prime precedence for any sincere press.
(I do know, haha, I mentioned “sincere press.”)
Even now, Minnesota press isn’t overlaying this story.
Shirley’s findings went uber-viral on social media — however the Minnesota Star-Tribune and St. Paul Pioneer Press have mentioned not a phrase about his submit as I write.
Effectively, like a lot of the nationwide media, these papers have lengthy had a hand-in-glove relationship with the state’s Democrats.
And as humorist Jim Treacher places it, they see their job as figuring out what tales the general public doesn’t have to learn about, as a result of they could harm the Democratic Celebration.
The opposite query, after all, is whether or not this scandal extends to different states, too.
And the reply is, virtually definitely.
The place cash floats round with out sufficient safeguards, fraud is sort of inevitable — and plenty of federal and state packages appear virtually intentionally designed to facilitate fraud.
I added that “virtually” purely out of courtesy.
This month a whistleblower in Maine alleged that the state’s Medicaid program was bilked out of tens of millions by one other Somali scammer.
And California’s nonpartisan state auditor lately issued a report on “excessive danger” state packages that discovered billions misplaced to wrongful food-assistance and different welfare claims.
The extent of the loss is staggering, even to cynics like me.
However what can we do?
We might attempt to discover extra sincere public officers. (Haha, I mentioned “sincere public officers”).
Intensive arrests and prosecutions — not solely of the scammers, however of the bureaucrats who turned a blind eye — gained’t magically make our officers sincere, nevertheless it would possibly make them suppose twice.
And we might merely flip off the money spigot by chopping welfare packages manner again.
If we go away more cash in taxpayers’ pockets, it’ll be tougher for public officers to steal it.
I do know, loopy speak.
And but — it will work.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of regulation on the College of Tennessee and founding father of the InstaPundit.com weblog.
