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Notes -
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.
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