I & I Editorial BoardSome of us are old enough to remember Matthew Lesko, the lanky, fast-talking late-night TV pitchman who promised people free government money to those who bought his books.
There are, Lesko said in one of his countless ads decades ago, “15,000 programs you can use to get a better job, get an education, or start your own business. Those who know about the programs are the ones who get the money!”
Lesko was right about how easy it is to get taxpayer money.
What Lesko didn’t say is that it’s easy to do even when it violates the law — especially if you live in a state run by Democrats.
Minnesota, of course, has been the epicenter of fraud stories these days, after the scale of the swindle became apparent. Not only did those committing fraud make off with billions, but fraudsters funneled at least some of that money into political campaigns to effectively buy lawmakers’ silence.
But Minnesota is hardly the only place where scammers have gone way beyond what Matthew Lesko promised in his books.
As Charles Silver and David Hyman note in the City Journal,
Frauds against government health-care programs are both common and costly. Fraudsters routinely scam (Medicare and Medicaid) for billions of dollars. States themselves run schemes of their own. COVID-related frauds, for example, exceeded $280 billion, with another $123 billion wasted or misspent. Obamacare enrollment fraud is pervasive, likely costing taxpayers $27 billion in 2025 and $21 billion in 2024.
California is under federal criminal investigation for wasting $37 billion to fight homelessness. It lost $20 billion in COVID-19-related federal unemployment money — the most of any state. Nearly half of the state’s increase in Medicaid spending went to pay for health care for illegal aliens. And it’s under investigation to see where the $4 billion in federal money for California’s never-ending bullet train project ended up.
Fox News reports that the Education Department found that “during a 12-month period between 2024 and 2025, scammers stole at least $10 million in federal financial aid from community colleges in California.”
Recently, three people in Brooklyn were found guilty of stealing $68 million from New York’s Medicaid program in a con that lasted seven years before they were caught.
See Also: “For Today’s Democrats, Fraud Is A Feature, Not A Bug“
The government routinely reports that Medicaid annually wastes 6% of benefits to errors and fraud, which works out to more than $37 billion. But that’s likely a vast understatement.
It’s worth noting that Medicaid fraud isn’t a universal problem – but one that tends to flourish in blue states. The Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards notes that “New York State spends two and a half times more on Medicaid than Florida, even though the latter has a larger population.”
Why is it so easy to steal from the federal government? Because, unlike a private business, nobody in government really cares if money is wasted. Who has lost their job after some major scam was uncovered?
Plus, as we pointed out in this space, fraud is good for big-government types because it creates new constituents and new sources of campaign cash.
The answer to this problem isn’t just to unleash armies of auditors and federal police. It’s to close the spigot entirely.
The federal government spends more than $3.6 trillion on what it calls “direct payments for individuals” and another $833 billion in grants to states that are supposed to end up in individual pockets.
That’s about two-thirds of the entire federal budget!
As long as there’s that much money flying around, fraudsters will flourish. And taxpayers will be bilked.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
I too am old enough to remember Lesko’s late night commercials. I use to think to myself after seeing one of them: “What the heck is the government doing in all these sort of enterprises that Lesko advertises his easy money commercials?”
Why-in the world-didn’t any of our prior President’s address this issue. After all, it was our money the government was marketing (according to Lasko) as “Free Money”.
No politician took this seriously. I’m not talking just about fraud but I’m also writing how the government piggy bank incentivizes fraud and unethical behavior.
Ethical would be letting the taxpayer keep part of his taxes and letting those who need help look to private charity-not to the government.
If any other pol did talk about these sort of government approved scams the pols certainly weren’t effective at stopping them.
This is one of the reason why I voted for Trump. It genuinely outrages him.
As long as the US gives away free good or free money some will take advantage of it. That’s just human nature and criminal nature.
Thank God we finally have a President that this sort of wellspring of bureaucratic scams-where they play with our money-matters.
Moreover, I have a feeling the “free money takers” are going to feel the heat of Trump’s DOJ.
And that’s another reason why I voted for President Trump! He takes this sort of thing as seriously as I do.
Article 1 Section 8 Powers of Congress
The BETTER question is WHERE did the authority come from the created all these programs to start with. Everybody is looking under every leaf for insurrection…THE OVER-THROW OF THE CONSTITUTIONALLY CREATED GOVERNMENT…look no further than the halls of congress.
REPEAL THE 17TH AMENDMENT.
The 17th changed where Senators were appointed by state legislatures to being elected by people from each state. Curious how repealing the 17th would help. No doubt congress get most of the blame here, after all, “it’s not their money.”
We need a program like DOGE to investigate and find the fraud. While there at it, they can work on reducing the error rate.
Instead of auditors trying to investigate how those government programs go so wrong with fraud, we are stuck with the IRS hiring 87,000 new auditors and agents to go after individual taxpayers to squeeze more from them.
When I was a Contracting Officer for the government, your annual review and subsequent bonus were higher if you spent more than less. Thus, if I tried to save the government money, I was considered less proficient than my coworker who spent millions more and even had the gall to request additional funding.
Which is just another reason milton Friedman would be such big fan of SpaceX, a For Profit company which lowered space freight costs by over 99%…by seeking a profit. Not NASA, SpaceX. Capitalism and innovation. Not congress/bureaucracy/red tape.
Excellent expose of this large-scale fraud, including a spot-on analysis of why it happens here (WAY too much money floating around to “help” and blue states who have zero intentions of cleaning it up). This vote-buying scheme has been going on for decades, but has become so huge that even complacent Americans can’t no longer ignore it. Thank you to the author for reporting on the ugly truth that Benjamin Franklin so wisely predicted would become the case. People (in the MN case at least, foreigners from a failed nation) have found an excellent way to pull off the largest fraud scheme in world history. All they needed were foolish libs to either try to help the disadvantaged (at minimum) or were in on it themselves for the money and votes (at maximum). This is what happens when suicidal empathy meets opportunists with no morals and great greed. Thank you to Issues and Insights for this important piece. Every American should be required to read it.
Come to Philadelphia, where the Democrats have had a monopoly for 60 years.
We endure circular money firing squads of the monopoly of building contractors permitted to overcharge for every job by not having to compete against excellent and financially competitive non-union contractors; thereby the unions have millions of extra dollars sloshing around to support the campaigns of any Democrat running for any office who will continue to support the monopolies that love to royally fleece their own citizens.
And the Philadelphia Teacher’s Union is far worse. They have fewer and fewer students every year, and yet more students, our future voters, cannot read or write or even graduate and more teachers get hired, all the teachers get raises and fewer hours to teach by the Democrats running the city and running the School Board, too.
To be fair, the Republican Party had the same corrupt monopolies and did the same circular financial firing squads, fleecing their own citizens with such glee too, for decades before the Democrats took over all the same corrupt monopolies that love to fleece their own citizens, with such glee, these days. Who is next? Anyone sane, honorable and not corrupt, please.
Philadelphia is a great, brilliant and very lovely city in every aspect of….. higher education, secondary private education, magnificent parks, medicine, architecture, law, museums, institutions, research, business, restaurant, tourism, innovations, history, sports…. other than our corrupt monopolies of tax raising, backfiring Democratic politicians who, most exasperatingly, get elected over and over.
Slide a billion over here, please
Evidently, it’s very easy to rip off our government. Many of the Somali pirates couldn’t read or speak English & had only been in America for a short period of time.
Nevertheless, they were able to bilk our government out of billions of dollars.
Hmm he looks like The Riddler from Batman with all those Question Mark on his outfit