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Comment by dolni | Hacker News Reader

When a significant share of the taxes you pay are mishandled or lost to fraud, yes it is a punishment.

That's been happening for a long time in the US. Staggering military industrial complex. Tens of billions lost in COVID relief. Billions lost in Minnesota due to unchecked privatized social welfare fraud (which has been known about for a decade).

Some mistakes will happen. What we have is unacceptable. If the government can't handle the money responsibly, it has no business collecting the money.

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Minnesota is only a drop in the ocean compared to Florida and other states. One of the current FL senators was CEO of one of the companies convicted of a much larger fraud.

That's more an indictment of the way you (the US) starve your public services of proper regulatory power with the right level of personnel to handle it.

But your Congress voted last year to defund the IRS and the administration are busy gutting the SEC and other regulators.

Oh and government fraud has nothing on the commercial and rent-seeker frauds extracting wealth for no benefit from their positions of control. But anti-trust prosecutions are basically a dead path for rectification.

Blaming the "government" for what happens from obvious policy failures is the fault of the policies and those that set them, not the "government" as some nameless bureaucracy.

>That's more an indictment of the way you (the US) starve your public services of proper regulatory power with the right level of personnel to handle it.

>Blaming the "government" for what happens from obvious policy failures

Who creates the policy that fails if not the government? If a supplier kept telling you they'd do something and kept screwing it up at what point do you move them to the bottom of your list for who to call to get stuff?

It's really easy to sit there enveloped in pure ignorance and say "those idiots just need to fund an administrative agency to prevent fraudulent daycare" or whatever but nobody in the US wants to do that because everyone's seen with their own two these sorts of endeavors turn into feeding troughs and revolving doors and rackets that the politicians and politically connected use to run businesses that make money by going through motions that provide little (just enough to keep some political support form useful idiots) value at taxpayer expense. How do you solve such a problem? It's immensely hard and complex.

I'm so sick of ideologues who can't think two steps ahead peddling these sorts of "just do this" simple and wrong solutions.

Do you have any sources for either or both of "billions" and "known about for a decade" that aren't a figurehead of the current US administration? Because this all smells a lot like "the immigrants are catching and eating cats and geese" story which also turned out to be a lie.

The fraud in Minnesota is upsetting. Fraud also appears to be nationally prevalent:

“New federal data released by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) shows the overall rate of improper payment in Minnesota’s Medicaid program is far below national averages.

In the review released this week, CMS found an error rate of slightly over 2.1%, compared to a national average of 6.1%. The data for the review was compiled before the Minnesota Department of Human Services began implementing new strategies to minimize the risk of fraud and harden its systems against bad actors.”

https://mn.gov/dhs/media/news/?id=1053-720779

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