Without going into political matters - how does something like this happen...?
For those who don't now, go on Youtube and search Nick Shirley Minnsota's Billion Dollar Fraud which kicked off a heated debate on how these daycare operators raked in millions of government funding without having a legitimate business / kids coming into the daycare at scale.
Because enforcement is nil? Government is good at throwing money at things. Lots of people get happy that their business is being patronized by government. But paying for people to staff government agencies, and having them go around stopping fraud and waste? No one wants that, especially not conservatives who tend to gut government agencies whenever they have a chance without a concomitant reduction in government responsibilities.
The solution is simple, though users of this site will howl with outrage - give government the tools, and funding, to enforce proper compliance, and also align incentives so that people are deterred from committing fraud in the first place. It makes a ton of sense to steal from the taxpayer if the chances of being caught are almost nonexistent, and the punishment is a financial slap on the wrist.
Your answer to the Government being good at throwing money at things to the point where there is copious amounts of fraud and waste is... to give the government more funding? I think first and foremost spending needs to be reduced!
God, the lack of intelligence and thought in this answer is depressing.
Governments hand out funding for lots of things. That is not the same thing as the government itself being funded. You think the government spends trillions annually on salaries and benefits? Of course not.
Wanting to reduce spending is completely uncorrelated to anything being discussed here, except in the sense that the only way to guarantee no money is stolen is to not give any away in the first place.
The most notorious example of this is the IRS. A dollar of investment in the IRS, in the actual agency, is estimated to return between 5-9x in terms of revenue collection. That's an ROI to make even the most aggressive VC investor wet their pants in envy.
But sure, by all means, stick to your talking points that haven't been relevant since Reagan was ripping the Constitution to shreds.
I tend not to agree with your takes sometimes, but I personally think you're completely right in this regard. I understand why people lament when the government doesn't provide services sufficiently, but that's not all the time like many/most people believe, and enforcement of rules/antifraud measures would go a long way. There's no reason why other countries can do that and we can't seem to.
Generally, most other countries experience these same problems. It's not front page headlines in the United States but if you follow the news of pretty much any country around the world, you're running into these kinds of issues all the time.
Name one thing that the goverment does better than the private sector. You can't name things that the government has outlawed the private sector from doing.
While you are at it, name one industry that the government has a sizeable stake in that hasn't seen prices inflate faster than the rest of the economy.
Because western society is built off high trust. Once you get scammed you realize just how much of daily commercial interaction only works because of trust.
Ding ding ding. Everything is downstream of this.
And on the flip side, once you go to a typical 3rd world country and see how nearly every interaction is some sort of scam or con and there’s absolutely zero trust in society, it shouldn’t be surprising when it happens here after you import these people. Most White people, both libs and cons, are completely delusional to this reality.
Because you had a once in a lifetime pandemic where the Trump administration approved trillions in financial relief. It was probably the right move at the time, but there naturally is going to be fraud as a result too.
While this case is not actually an example of Trump administration, as it was mostly aid programs created by the state of Minnesota, it does bring up an interesting case and point. People are extremely up in arms about this case, but why? This fraud, by scale, is actually rather small. The estimated max of the fraud is worth about 1B dollars. To give some context, the PPP, or paycheck protection program, had multiple cases of fraud exceeding 1B dollars all because Trump was too excited to rush that bill out with zero protections from fraud. That cost 64B in fraud, according to the FBI.
So why are we so angry about 1B in Minnesota and not the 64B in the entire US from the PPP fraud? I don't mean to speculate, but I have a strong feeling it has more to do with the minority group and people involved in the fraud compared to the actual scale of the fraud. I mean, we've seen SO much fraud during the Trump administration, but people barely batted an eye. This? This gets people active. And watch what will happen. People will look at this and say "If only we didn't have Somali's, we wouldn't have fraud" which is drawing the completely wrong conclusion. The conclusion we should be drawing is that the systems we have in place to prevent fraud are failing, and we need to build a more solid system that prevents fraud. But that's never the conclusion people come to.
Same thing happens with crime, with jobs, with immigration, with dating, with fucking everything in life. People instantly jump to blaming a group rather than the institutions that have allowed for such destruction to exist.
>So why are we so angry about 1B in Minnesota and not the 64B in the entire US from the PPP fraud?
Because one was emergency funding, that everyone knew was rushed and would likely be abused to a degree, but was also necessary to keep the economy going. The other was not an emergency, is totally unnecessary and wasteful spending to people who largely should not be in the country, and are also funding terrorist organizations.
And most of your comment is just further arguments as to why the government must shrink in size and scope. To which I would wholeheartedly agree.
The fraud is almost 10B as of now. This is only in MN and is only related to daycare a medicaid food programs. This doesn't include medicaid and medicare health care services. It is estimated that home healthcare fraud in MN is north of 5B since 2021, but the numbers haven't been published yet for the long term.
No, the fraud has been going on since at least 2013. Covid scalled it up, but the fraud continued to grow at a parabolic rate long after covid was over.
Look at whose campaigns the daycares are donating tens of millions to if you want a clear answer. Funny how Minnesota's flag was changed to look more like the Somali flag huh? And this has been going on for well over a decade...
Do you have a source for the donations claim?
The local news has been talking about this in MN for almost a decade.
A daycare was making tens of millions of dollars of political contributions? Seems kind of farfetched...
A lot of the allocation in PPP was probably pay to play, but the idea that a daycare was donating $10+mm to the trump admin (or any admin) seems just ridiculous
It's not "a" daycare. It's a network of dozens of daycares, food aid, and home healthcare companies owned by Somalis that provide no proof of actual operations and receive tens of millions in government aid through CCAP and other MN-based or federal programs. In some cases there are even state records that show some businesses were shut down for failing audits that still received monthly payments from the government after the fact. Donation records are publicly available on ActBlue where anyone can see the entities making frequent donations that in aggregate reach into the 10s of millions over years of doing this. They only donate to 1 party, the same party that's imported 10s of 1000s of them into the state and refuses to prosecute/convict them even when they are brought up on fraud charges. This has been reported on locally since the early 2010s and is only now getting national attention because of that YouTuber's video going viral.
Thanks for the flag. I guess ignorance is bliss. Definitely did not need to see that. At least changing the flags of those 'slave' states was a good red herring excuse. This is just sad.
Man what a great distraction from the Epstein files.
Idk if I'd call it a distraction when it linearly goes back to the 2010s. And I don't think anything short of a massive new war can truly divert attention from the current admin's staggering failure on that front... hence all the Venezuela blustery bs.
Well we just kidnapped their dictator, so...
The actual reason was because in the wake of covid, the USDA was no longer required to come in person to check for fraud, for obvious reasons of not wanting to spread covid. If checkers existed, then the fraud at most would've been minor.
You also have the fact that Minnesota state attempted to stop the misuse of funds after the FBI discovered much of the fraud, only for the Somali groups to sue the state on the grounds of discrimination. It didn't work, but because American courts are slow, an injunction was granted on part of the Somali groups basically allowing them to receive payments until the lawsuit was settled, which is commonplace in America and Western nations. Oh, and they also tried to bribe jurors on this case.
This was all based on the initial food scams and food fraud cases. After this story broke, the fraud spread to every other area that money could be taken.
The fraud is simply a group of desperate people who see an easy opportunity. It happens all the time. Not just with desperate people, but with people who see easy money and have the will to seize on that. Corporations commit fraud all the time, because they see an opportunity to take and no one will stop them. Organized crime is essentially just massive groups of people seeing major money making opportunity with the resistance being less than what would be needed to dissuade people.
It's not an issue of Somali or any other group. It's an issue of the government essentially leaving an all you can eat buffet of money out, and then being shocked when people start walking out with plates. If we want this to stop, we have to actually address the opportunity part, because the want for more will always exist. Fraud will always exist, as an easy opportunity to take something is undeniable. What you have to do is make the consequences harsh enough that committing the fraud becomes not worth it anymore
In MN state regulators only "require" a visit once in a six month period. That visit is scheduled weeks in advance and it only really checks for "safety" issues on the sites. There were thousands if not tens of thousands of safety violations noted by these inspectors who also noted that the day cares often times only had a handful of children at a time even though they were registed for and were billing for 50 - 200 kids.
I am 100% convinced that the state democratic party was involved in this scam because the regulations were written in such a way that decrepit old warehouses and retail centers that were falling apart were blanket approved if they were filled by immigrants and minorities.
In MA for example day care centers that service "low income communities" have both their customers and workforces subsidized. This creates situations where market rate day care centers can not compete therefore they close. Causing costs to rise for non subsidized families. Which any non lefty, read non retard, could have told you would happen. Every market the government meddles in or provides "support" for has this happen. Get the government out of the business of subsidizing waste and inefficency.
Also, your belief that this is not linked to the Somali community you are delusional. The entirity of the country of Somalia works on patronage, government corruption, and theft. This is a cultural issue.
This is just an objectively false statement. The scale of fraud in the Somali community is astronomical. They are easily America's worst immigrants, from their huge fraud schemes to their anti-Semitic religious ideology. And these aren't "desperate" people, as you claim. They stole billions and used it for countless luxury goods. Desperate people steal bread, not Land Rovers.
Because state and local governments have no incentive to enforce laws against fraud. Look at the rampant Medicaid and Medicare fraud that occurs. Especially the “legal” fraud that happens where states who are complicit use provider taxes to claim a higher portion of federal Medicaid dollars than what they should receive which is then recycled back into providers through payments, which typically exceeds the burden of the provider tax and ultimately just wasted federal taxpayer dollars. This isn’t a partisan issue, this stems from local and state governments being purely incompetent at enforcing the law and the federal government holding the burden when states fail to properly allocate resources, which is very often.
How does something like this happen? Same reason we have a Senator from Florida who defrauded Medicaid and Medicare of hundreds of millions. Same way that we have thousands of contractors at all levels of government overbilling for work or goods that sometimes never even get delivered.
And that reason is the simple fact that the New England Yankees who founded and built this nation and its institutions assumed that freedom meant all people would act rationally and righteously, and that assumption was naïve. So sure, you can say immigration ruined this country, but it was the immigrants 200 years before the Somalis that set us on this path coupled with the abdication of power by elites Coolidge or Roosevelt.
Because of wrong incentives democracy creates as a system. Politicians are voted in for 4 years and are given a monopoly on force and can do whatever they want in that time span unpunished. So, there are no incentives for a politician to care about where the money goes to, its not their money and they won't get punished.
Gonna use PPP loans to start my own daycare
because the smartest guys go to Wall Street/FAANG instead of USDA
This happens when you import a bunch of people with a national average IQ of 69 and hire a bunch of government employees who have IQs lower than that.
is the FBI doing anything about this lol. Has anyone been arrested or has a formal investigation been announced yet?
It is kind of funny that WSO is getting its news from
Nick Shirley
And where should they get their news from, the 93% liberal leaning mass media? Unless you want to put complete blinders on these days, most educated folks who are moderate or conservative are looking beyond the mainstream media into podcasts / youtube / x because that's where you find the truth these days
What year are you existing in that “93%” of the media is left-leaning?
Almost all of the major American media companies are now owned by oligarchs and corporate interests.
Besides MSNOW, what media is a left wing propaganda machine? There are lots of conservative media whose purpose is to promote conservative ideas.
Ignorance is bliss. Let me tell you, this happens in every state, every county, every bureau, and institution that accepts money from the federal government. I see it every day, and you really can't do anything about it. You'll be retaliated against, gaslit, most people don't have the lawyers, well documented evidence, or stamina to hold institutions accountable. It's easier to benefit from a crooked system than to fight it, and the people that do have the stomach to expose things don't know how to fight. Screaming and getting emotional doesn't do anything. No one cares until someone puts such a huge spotlight on it that it can't be ignored. That's how systems are designed.
In society there are problems. These problems need to look like they're being addressed, they don't necessarily need to be materially addressed. Politicians need optics, they need to say we're fighting X, we allocated a budget for Y, if states want funding then they need to do Z. States and institutions accept the money. For example, you'll get funding if you run a day care for special needs kids. You can't discriminate, how do you enforce that? No one wants to watch a high maintenance kid who bites, hits, throws temper tantrums. So they start cherry picking the kids they accept into programs when they're not supposed to. Or they bill for services they never perform by using copy and paste documents for metrics that track process not effects. How do you prove subtle discrimination? Who has the money to even try? People who need government services usually don't.
There are services that the government funds that people never see on the street. All it takes is one gatekeeper not returning a call, a sheet of paper that disappears or keeps ending up on the bottom of a pile of papers, or emails that no one had "time" to answer, or someone with a fancy title straight up lying to a family about their rights. All the government can do is make some rules and withhold funding, but they rely on street level bureaucrats to enforce them, and it's impossible to enforce every detail, especially when the street level bureaucrats don't believe you should have the rights they're supposed to be helping you get. You would be surprised how many ignorant people sitting behind a desk don't think families should have certain rights they're entitled to even though the laws are already passed, budgets are already allocated, and it costs them personally nothing to just do their job and approve it. Poor people in need love policing other poor people, and they're more passionate about denying someone their rights than people are about fighting for their rights. But I digress...It's also more profitable in the short-term not to enforce anything.
When something like this makes it public then people think, "How could something like this happen!?" When it happens every day in their own backyard. And many times they're a cog in the system that enables it. You just don't want to be the institution that gets caught in the spotlight or news cycle so you do everything you can to keep it from going public. Every single state is looking at what's happening in Minnesota and are quietly saying, "Glad it's them and not us. What do we have to do to not get a spotlight looking into our skeletons?" If you get caught then you ride the storm until no one cares anymore, and they're distracted by the next thing.
And this is why libertarians never get elected. Everyone wants someone else to pay for what they want. If people were decent, they would donate and help those that need help without the state and its monopoly use on force, taxation, and spending.
Also because libertarianism is a 12 year old's worldview. Most people grow out of it.
Wasn’t that debunked?
So debunked that the incumbent governor just announced he will not seek re-election.
I think Americans take for granted how poorly every aspect of their society is run. America has so much material wealth relative to, say, European countries that they almost don't notice the staggering waste and corruption at every level of corporate and political governance.
If you've never spent a lot of time in Switzerland or Germany, you as an American cannot begin to fathom what an actually efficient government or business looks like.
Most Americans have never left their state, let alone the country.
Sadly true. Or, as a soon to be expat...I'd prefer they stay the fuck home and not stink up the place.
Why in the world do we import the worst of the third world? It makes 0 sense, if we need more bodies we can take white collar workers from China / India instead of low-trust, low-IQ, low-skilled refugees from a dysfunctional country
I see project import infinity Indians is still going strong
Lol I'm not saying we need to import more. Just that IF we are importing, we might as well import talent that can actually contribute net positively. Doesn't have to be Indians, can be Chinese or Korean or German or whatever. Are you seriously arguing that this is the worse alternative to bringing in people from Salvador / Somalia / Congo?
Tech CEOs seething at the thought of having to hire Americans
Lack of strict auditing is usually the culprit. Once it got messy and I wanted to understand the actual legal mechanics behind these schemes for a project of mine,
I used JD Supra to track the court filings and compliance gaps. It really helps to see how they managed to bypass the system for so long.
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