Ohio Governor: Fraud Is 'the Cost of Doing Business'

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Look, as a practical matter, it is impossible to prevent and discover 100% of all fraud. The incentives are too high, government resources are not infinite, and at some point, the juice is not worth the squeeze. 

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That point, though, is pretty close to 0% fraud. Once fraud reaches a level substantially above a few percent at most, citizens rightly feel like they are being taken for a ride. 

That does not appear to be the opinion of Ohio's governor, however, whose spokesman characterized fraud, which is likely quite substantial, according to what is being revealed at this early stage of the investigations. And not just fraud, but people are revealing that daycares that have been inspected have been—by the government's own records—dangerous petri dishes that are unfit for human habitation. 

Governor Mike DeWine is hardly a favorite of Republicans. A moderate Republican, I would argue that he is marginally better than a Democrat. But only marginally. He was a COVID tyrant and a sour critic of the direction the party has gone, as trust in government has declined. He is, as Bob Dole was once described, a tax collector for the welfare state. 

I do not consider every video from citizen journalists that appear to show fraudulent daycares to be definitive proof of fraud—yet—but they sure do indicate that a lot of fraud is going on. There may be an explanation for one or two of these facilities looking to be abandoned or without children, but not for so many. 

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Nor is there any explanation for why the per-capita number of daycares for Somalis seems to be tens or hundreds of times that of other ethnic groups. At the very least, this requires investigation and explanation, and we all know what the explanation will be. Most of them will be shells. 

One of the things I have seen here in Minnesota is the attitude among policymakers and bureaucrats that their job is to get as much federal money as possible, not to run programs that serve citizens to the best extent possible. The reward structure is all about grabbing as much federal loot, not ensuring there is no fraud or even poor performance. 

Think Chicago schools, where everybody is grabbing as much as possible from taxpayers, while educating kids isn't even on the radar. 

We are often told we must help people in need, and I agree that there are always societal edge cases where help from the broader community is necessary to bridge gaps that families cannot. But it is an indisputable fact that once large quantities of money starts flowing through any organization, the primary goal of that organization will be self-preservation and expansion. It is human nature, and not exclusive to government. 

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What makes government unique is that there is no natural feedback loop, as exists in most human organizations. Because the government has the power to compel people to pay in, it never faces an actual lack of resources except when it is self-imposed. Most claims of insufficient funds are products of either misfeasance or malfeasance. 

Look at our public schools, which are funded at levels at or near the top of the Western world. By most measures, only one country in the world spends more per pupil than the US, but our performance is, at best, "meh." Worse, we are told endlessly that schools are grossly underfunded. Chicago has among the highest per-pupil spending in the country, yet students often cannot read or write, let alone do arithmetic. 

That failure is used as an excuse to increase funding, of course. Failure is rewarded, not punished. 

Government officials who see their job as running the government see their interests as being tied to the government, with citizens seen mostly as resources to be mined for money. They understand they must make appeals for support from those citizens, but those appeals are instrumental—an unfortunate necessity to keep the rabble minimally satisfied. Actually serving the public is at best a secondary consideration. 

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You cannot tell me, or any ordinary person, that no government official took notice of the fact that a shell corporation opened more than 40 child care centers on one day and started taking in government money. Nor did they fail to notice that the percentage of daycare centers listing Somali as the primary language vastly exceeds, by thousands of percent, the Somali proportion of the population. 

Of course they knew. 

But why would they care? The more "clients," the more money they get to manage. I remember doing a quick scan of government welfare websites a while back and immediately noticing that they didn't brag about how many people they helped get off welfare, but how many they got ON welfare, as if that is the metric that mattered. 

As the reaction to whistleblowers always shows, the institutions desperately want to keep the grift going. Anybody who pops his head up to fight the fraud has his career ruined. There is an omertà code in these agencies. If you reveal the dirty secrets, they will come after you. 

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And the media is part of the enforcement mechanism. You may have noticed that the #1 priority of the Pravda Media is not investigating the fraud, but "debunking" the people revealing it. CBS News literally claimed they debunked Nick Shirley's video not by looking into the accusations, but by asking the government whether the claims were true. 

Really? 

The media see themselves as scribes for lefty bureaucrats. 

We don't know the exact number of scam businesses, and unfortunately, white collar cases are extremely difficult to prove well enough to convict, but the scale of the fraud is so vast that it is obvious to anybody who has the wit to look. 

Government officials are charged with ferreting this kind of thing out. They aren't amateurs, and yet an amateur in one day can do a thousand times more than any of these "professionals" have in their entire career. 

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That's not incompetence. It is complicity. And what drives that complicity is that the politicians who keep shoveling money into the system get a large cut to keep them in office. 

It's a version of the USAID scam. Find a sympathetic "victim," and exploit people's compassion to grab as much money as possible. 

In the case of Minnesota, how much turns out to be about HALF of all Medicaid funds, and God knows how much SNAP and Section 8 funding. And...

It goes on. It is the lifeblood of the Democratic Party. And for too long, the Republicans have done nothing about it. They are scared to deal with such a massive operation, and unwilling to be accused of being racist, or cruel, or Nazis. 

More and more Americans are fed up, as they should be. No doubt some people who genuinely need help will now slip through the cracks as part of the backlash, and liberals will point to them as proof that we are way too cruel. 

But it is they who are responsible for that. When they let the system rot to the point that half or more of the resources are stolen, you have no right to argue that the system needs preservation. 

  • Editor’s Note: Every single day, here at Hot Air, we will stand up and FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT against the radical left and deliver the conservative reporting our readers deserve. Sometimes, however, we just point and laugh, and let the radical Left embarrass itself. This is one of those times.

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