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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 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.
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.
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.
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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