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Notes -
Lets talk about the amateur expose of the Somali day-care industry in Minnesota.
Here is the full 42 minutes of my crew and I exposing Minnesota fraud, this might be my most important work yet.
This video and associated clips have been taking the right-wing internet by storm. The format is new and interesting; a charismatic zoomer social media influencer teamed up with an angry obsessive boomer autist. Their idea was to show up in person to various government-subsidized "child care centers" to see if there was any meaningful economic activity going on. The results are certainly interesting if nothing else.
The most notable finding is the complete absense of evidence of child activity at all but one of the facilities. I'm not sure how definitive this is that fraud is occuring (especially since we don't know what time of day or week these visits were made), but it is certainly suggestive. I wouldn't be eager to display my entrusted children to a group of strange men who seem oddly interested in seeing them either.
One might get the impression that these facilities are completely unregulated and uninspected. This appears to be wrong. You can look up the licenses of Hennepin County child care centers and find annual inspection results, usually with violations! The laundry list of violations found with each annual inspection did not seem to prevent these facilities from recieving 7 figures annually in taxpayer funds.
The most depressing part is realizing this will make no difference. Everyone who mattered was aware this was going on and was fine with it, and that will remain true.
I know it feels good to blackpill, but it does look like roughly 90 people from multiple states are facing charges so far.
You can argue that those 90 people don't matter because the Democrats/Illuminati/Jews/WEF/Rosthschilds/Saurian Aliens from Zeta Reticuli aren't catching a RICO rap, but I'll take whatever wins I can get right now.
While you hang those 90 pickpockets, are another 900 working the crowd watching the executions?
Would you prefer 990 and no show?
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Are such investigations downstream of DOGE etc. querying of government spending? That is, would they be happening if Trump wasn't in office and it was President Kamala and VP Tim?
I have a depressing notion this is so, and I would like to be proven wrong (honestly!)
I've seen Elon Musk making some noises that it is downstream of DOGE investigations, but the man is unashamed about self-aggrandizement.
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Assuming a judge doesn't simply throw out their convictions. It does however seem to be a stake through the heart of the "fraud is so miniscule it's not worth enforcing" argument that's been made about all kinds of welfare programs.
That's what is so astounding about this, because generally fraud is miniscule; when you get into cases of (say) social welfare fraud in my country, it's often genuine mistakes. Certainly there are also cases of deliberate fraud and the amount mounts up over the years, but this is €24 million out of a total budget of €27 billion, so around 0.09% which is not great but which is not huge huge either.
Something this big going on for years is amazing, and it seems to be all kinds of schemes, so $250 million for Covid child nutrition programme, other Covid support programmes, this childcare scam - allegedly $9 billion in total? That's serious money sloshing around.
Minnesota budget spending in 2025 was $59 billion, so if we spread $9 billion over 5 years, that's roughly $1.8 billion per year, which comes to 3% of annual budget for 2025. Not a huge amount relatively speaking, but not nothing either. And if we leave it as $9 billion out of $59 billion, that's 15% which is getting up into respectable figures.
A huge percentage of covid stimulus was passed out as more-or-less universally acknowledged fraud(google 'shaniqua llc' if you'd like). There's tons of anecdata that lots of the covid institutional support was completely wasted as well. 'Fraud prevention' for this particular set of programs was not only not a priority it was literally not considered at all- it was intended as plausibly deniable handouts.
The autism and childcare scams almost certainly had a votes for political cover quid pro quo going on.
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I think the most depressing part is knowing that your TOTAL lifetime tax liability is around $1M.
These people stole the LIFETIME tax output of around 10,000 people.
Taxes are a huge burden on people. They’re one of the major things our politics are decided on. If I don’t pay these, or even if I mess them up, I’ll go to jail. CPAs are an entire, large, industry.
We’re all paying these things, and 10,000 peoples lifetime of burden to the government just gets robbed.
I pay taxes (a LOT of taxes), I obey the laws, drive the speed limit etc. and then I turn on the internet and see stuff like this, people just openly robbing stores and filming themselves do it, see violent criminals released into my neighborhood etc.
Kindof hard to stomach honestly.
Nitpick. But this isn't true unless you're just being repeatedly careless with corporate taxes. If there isn't a clear intent to not pay or to avoid tax, the IRS wants you to pay far more than they want to prosecute you.
Where you are 1000% correct, however, is that if you mess them up because of a totally indecipherable tax code, you may have to pay all sorts of penalties, which does seem, to me, to be outrageous.
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It really makes you wonder about televised public executions as I think deterrence works on reasonably high impulse control people capable of organised white collar crime.
If there are no consequences for the people doing this, we are all mugs for working law abiding jobs and paying our taxes when grafting is an easier way to provide for ourselves and our posterity.
On one hand, I can see the desire for clemency from other white-collar workers: we don't want being Catch-22'd to be a death sentence because of stupid bureaucrats/senior management- something we are threatened with/reminded of every single day in some form or another, so naturally we are concerned that making it a death sentence for others will instead ultimately expand into a death sentence for these kinds of things (and turn into a not-death-sentence for others because anarcho-tyranny).
On the other hand, the price of choosing to negotiate with obvious anti-social elements instead of mercilessly deleting them is not zero. Compare "insurance premiums go up to cover loss", but in the linked case, you get the message that crime will not be tolerated while the [steelman of the] Blue Tribe way of just ignoring it does not yield such a benefit.
On the gripping hand, I think that if we start by punishing bureaucrats that produce codes that can't be compiled and judges that intentionally fail to judge this way (and someone already tapped the sign that calls for this) then maybe society will return to being compatible with the idea once again.
My favorite recent prominent example of this is the president himself catching a felony because he didn't use campaign funds to pay hush money to a mistress. I realize this isn't an exact description of what happened in that case, but it's close enough for government work.
I commit the same "falsification of business records" every damn week because retarded tax laws around software development require me to precisely track exactly how much time I spend on development of new features vs. maintaining existing applications and I can confidently say that absolutely 0 software devs are accurately reporting how their time is divided between these things.
Cases like Trump's definitely put a "3 felonies a day" sort of fear in me if I ever piss off the wrong DA politically.
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This never happens. If it does, it occurs only in insignificant amounts. Even if the amounts are significant, why do you care so much about what a small fraction of Somali immigrants are doing when billionaires steal more from all of us everyday?
It’s called Doing the Bare Minimum in holding up your end of the Social Contract. Paying a lot of taxes just means you’re privileged enough to exploit societal inequities.
Something to cheer you up! The average American’s lifetime taxes paid is $525K, in which case the $8B would be more than the lifetime tax output of at least 15,000 people. MN is a bit higher but still under $600K per person. Highest by state is NJ at almost $1M. *grumpy @The_Nybbler noises*
This is a reddit level trope.
Please, please, please tell me, specifically, how billionaires are committing massive theft every day. My opinion and prediction is that you can't because you don't actually mean what you've written. What you mean is that "billionaires make lots of money, I don't, and that's bad." Which, if you want to say it, is actually an argument you could make!
But instead we get to this righteous indignation based on personal emotion and now, suddenly, billionaires are repeat mega felons. Come on.
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You're posting a number of sarcastic comments in which you fail to speak plainly. Stop it.
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Not alone that, this is money supposedly going to the needy, and this means the needy are left unserved and in want, while some people are enriching themselves hand over fist. It's screwing everybody over - the taxpayers, the honest people working in these fields, the people who really do need and deserve the services.
I like the government to fund some welfare services, and I generally dislike bureaucracy. I am also fine with some immigration.
Anyone who turns a blind eye to welfare fraud is effectively steering us towards an equilibrium with less welfare spending and more red tape. (And yes, red tape can very much prevent welfare from reaching the needy, because the needy often are not great at jumping through the hoops of bureaucracy.) If the perps are immigrants, it will also foster an anti-immigrant sentiment as surely as thunder follows lightning.
I wish I could blame some Ayn Rand fans who were working as moles to achieve that outcome, but in all likelihood the officials who turned a blind eye were probably SJ people who failed to think of the consequences. After all, Uncle Sam has plenty of money, and if the Somali skim a bit to keep their relatives from starvation, what is the harm?
Except that the taxpayers and voters feel very differently (I imagine). And sending money to a failed state through intransparent channels is not necessarily net positive.
In short, lawfulness is (at least) instrumentally useful. Even if you feel your cause is good, breaking laws to further it will generally generate a backslash. I imagine SBF did not donate a lot of money to EA in 2025.
Only if there's anyone with the power to add the red tape to attempt to stop the fraud. If not, money given to fraudsters simply increases without bounds, as with SSI/SSDI fraud.
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One thing that’s important to remember, and that I feel a lot of people don’t remember, is that governments don’t fund anything - they direct funds towards other people. Taxpayers fund things.
You don’t want the government to spend money on social welfare - you want your fellow Americans to do so. Unfortunately, a large portion of your fellow taxpayers feel like they are footing the bill for the destruction of their lifestyles. They feel that the spending is both excessive and directly against their interests.
Social welfare has always been something the right wishes to reduce - mostly because social welfare is too indiscriminate towards those it helps. Many taxpayers don’t want to spend money helping an unrepentant fuckup, but would be fine donating it to someone who is down on their luck. The government being in charge of distribution removes this discretion, and (considering both this story and the story of FEMA workers refusing to assist Trump voters) actively works against their intuition of who needs help.
On the contrary, it's too discriminate. Lots of people are in genuine need for help, but the government allocates funds on the basis of proximity to officials and how useful the recipients are to politicians, forming a toxic positive feedback loop. This money would have done more social good if someone drove through the streets throwing bags of it off the back of a truck.
The sad truth is that scammers often are much better at navigating the hoops, and way more willing to play the game for social workers etc. (e.g. one example from the job of "I am a poor single mother in fear of domestic violence from my partner" who prevailed with this on the social worker to get the guy kicked out, when it was he doing the childcare and she was drinking, betting on the horses, and negligent of the kids*. Mommy's rationale? if she could present herself to the housing department, and public sympathy, with this story then she would get preferential treatment for 'I want that new build house and if you don't give it to me I'll go public with my sob story') than honest people who are genuinely in need.
As a government low-level minion, you may suspect the hell out of "this is a scam" but unless you have rock-solid undeniable evidence and proof that will stand up in court before a bleeding-heart judge who believes it is the responsibility of the local/national government to hand out money and goodies to the needy, you can't do a thing about refusing to process the application, because any whiff of anything that can be deemed to be used in a court case for discrimination by an ambulance-chaser lawyer will get you, the department, and everyone in trouble.
So the incentive is there, even if you're not a bleeding-heart yourself, to just tick the boxes and go along with the CYA process.
**Even funnier, her dad owned the local bookmakers, so she knew what she was talking about when she said 'this woman and her maternal family spend all day drinking in the pub and betting on the horses'. But of course, all this is only hearsay so it can't go down on the official files. And of course, nobody from the office can go on the radio with "this story is a heap of bullshit and she's a lying bitch", so these sob-stories get into the media and are believed uncritically by the public who don't know any better, who get served this by a journalist all too eager for a good human interest story that will grab headlines and attention. If you ever hear/read "We contacted Department/Office Z about this and they refused to comment", this does not mean "yeah the story is all true and they have no defence", it means "legally they can't say a word because bound by confidentiality".
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I'll agree to that.
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I disagree, for the same reason the government does.
The intended recipients of the social program budget are the social workers; the point of these programs is to employ them. It's UBI, basically- that's the social good the government is buying, and abating starvation in the poorest cross-section of the proletariat is secondary. After all, it's not them who'll be revolting if their meal ticket were revoked (if they were capable of this they wouldn't need the aid, obviously); and "but if you axe these programs then children will die" [cue Sarah McLachlan] has for the overwhelming fraction of modernity been a nearly unbeatable campaign slogan so it continues.
That's why fraud really is small potatoes here- the stated goal of "making sure the disadvantaged get the money" is a propaganda line to make the UBI-receivers think they're doing good (and to keep the low-information voters in line), much like "making sure children get educated" is for the education system.
For maximum cynicism, you can class all UBI-receivers as the intended recipients- "fraud" is just a way of asserting that you're smart enough, and assertive enough, to be a threat to the government's social project (whatever that happens to be and why remains an exercise for the reader), and should have bags of money thrown at you to mollify you just like the natives do. If you are not, it's a signal you'll act in other anti-social ways that are more obviously identifiable as such (especially in male-coded ways that associate would-be-only-fraudsters with imminent security threats [i.e. eating the neighborhood pets], which make the other UBI-receivers nervous thus risking they do things that result in more votes for the other guy).
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