Fraud and the demoralization of Americans
“Political hope, the most disorienting of drugs.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith
I saw a few recent videos where travelers said all of Congress should be fired for the TSA travel delays. That’s how I feel about Congress given our national debt and the inability to curb spending. A serious legislative body would never spend this recklessly and put their own interests so callously above the health of the Republic.
Simply put, that’s one of the reasons I wanted to put more focus on the importance of state and local government and be a part of building American Habits and the Center for Practical Federalism. We all know Congress is broken. Real reform and accountability are happening at the state and local levels of government.
Related to that federal overspending, and in many ways flowing from it, is the massive amount of fraud we are now witnessing. We have all known there is a lot of fraud baked into the system but now it seems to be more overt and brazen. We’re often left to wonder whether anything of substance is being done and if there will be real accountability for the fraudsters.
I wrote the other day about the fraud in Los Angeles, where ghost hospices siphoned money from Medicare and Medicaid through sham billing. Scandals in Minnesota have likewise shown how easily massive abuses can flourish when government grows careless, compromised, or unwilling to police itself. Some articles point out how foreign bots bill Medicaid and Medicare for services. It’s all quite demoralizing if you are an American taxpayer. This clip from Fox News is just one example of the kind of fraud cases routinely being uncovered.
And when it comes to Washington, even with my own brief stint on Capitol Hill, I came to see corruption more clearly through an interview I did years ago with Peter Schweizer and through reading a couple of his books on insider trading and abuse of power. I’d recommend both “Throw Them All Out” and “Extortion” by Schweizer.
Rampant corruption is so damaging because it not only robs taxpayers and undermines public programs, but also saps the nation’s moral energy. It demoralizes the country. Many just tune out the noise completely but the theft against the taxpayers marches on.
The Trump administration, and particularly Vice President Vance, have been more vocal in saying they are going to do something about the massive fraud. President Trump appointed Vance to tackle this “war on fraud,” an announcement he made during last month’s State of the Union address. We’ll see. I hope real accountability emerges for taxpayers. Just as I hope we get tougher in America on violent crime, I hope we get serious and less complacent about those defrauding the taxpayers. It feels like a form of economic terrorism towards the Americans that play by the rules and it needs to be rectified.
Trump also highlighted the problem of insider trading on Capitol Hill, where we’ve seen the net worth of some federal lawmakers rapidly skyrocket. I’d love to see real reform on that issue. Congress should not be a place where one enriches themself, but the season of public service is undertaken in the spirit of Cincinnatus.
Still, the fraud engulfing our welfare and our entitlement systems is a great reminder to elect local leaders who are passionate about oversight and see themselves as watchdogs for taxpayers. Good government does not happen by accident; it depends on leaders who ask hard questions, follow the money, and treat every public dollar as money taken from a citizen who earned it. While the amount of fraud is demoralizing, vigilant oversight is one way to restore public trust and real accountability.
If you’re discouraged about what you are seeing, below is a short clip of a few of the leaders at the state level that have impressed me and why the work at American Habits matters. It’s a reminder, which we all need from time to time, that there is good news and good people out there.
—Ray Nothstine
— The Federalism Beat