Although it rarely smacks us in the face as we wade through the difficulties of our daily lives, outright financial fraud and associated chicanery rob us blind every single day.
The Federal Trade Commission’s most recent estimate is that consumer scams cost us well over $158 billion dollars every year, but the real pot of gold is robbing taxpayers through outrageous frauds. No one really knows because the financial controls and oversight of most government programs and agencies are so incredibly—or deliberately—lax or lacking to avoid offending the criminals stealing our money (here’s looking at you, Minnesota Democrats!), but credible sources conservatively estimate that between $233 billion and $521 billion of our tax dollars go straight into the pockets of fraudsters each year. Insurance fraud alone adds another $300 billion per year to the gaping holes in our pockets through higher premiums and worse coverage. In addition, the startling and uncontrolled growth of fraud associated with both identity theft and e-commerce suggests that a golden age of incredibly lucrative theft might soon be upon us. Oh, just to put the cherry on this rancid cake of duplicity, a new IRS report shows that tax fraud has jumped a whopping 112% in just the past year; yes, it’s a wonderful world of criminality wherever we look today.
But it gets worse.
We also need to account for the mind-bogglingly criminal amount of wasteful government spending across the United States each year, which is yet another avenue for impoverishing us, but this is rarely considered fraud—just good politics. It has been estimated that 59 cents of every dollar spent by government goes to programs with no discernible useful purpose.
Whether the money was legitimately appropriated makes no difference if (to take some examples from 2024, the last year of Biden), we have spent $477,000 on experiments involving transgender monkeys, $2.1 million for a climate-focused girl empowerment project in Paraguay, $700,000 studying why adults enjoy Lego sets, or $250,000 to understand why Londoners drink more tea than New Yorkers. It’s all fraud because it takes money out of our pockets in order to throw it away on inefficiency and idiocy.
It is easy to understand why the permanent government hated the investigations President Trump initiated into runaway spending with the help of the tech wizards of DOGE; a paycheck is a paycheck, even it is funding foolishness.
Moreover, the industry of welcoming millions upon millions of illegal immigrants to America, which the Trump administration is wisely attempting to reverse with no help whatsoever from Democrats, has been another barely legal way to defraud us all. It is estimated that we are all on the hook for overall costs of around $150billion every year to house, feed, and educate illegal immigrants, which ends up costing every American man, woman, and child over $1,000 annually to fund what amounts to a fraud that is officially sanctioned—but still a fraud.
The sad fact that we now need to pay ICE and Homeland Security officers to conduct nationwide operations to arrest and deport people who never should have been allowed into America in the first place is rarely counted as a fraud committed upon the people of our nation by criminal government officials, but it is difficult to consider it anything but if we remember these fraudsters are always breaking the law—in this case to enrich themselves with votes and public money.
Add in the escalating legal costs associated with never ending court battles with liberal judges, NGO’s, and various champions of immigrant rights, none of whom care a hoot about the actual laws on our books, and you can start to understand why there is little money left at the end of the day to care for our own veterans, children, and the elderly. Little Pablo and Ahmed, you see, need years of bilingual education, lots of medical and dental care, and cash for their whole families—so screw you for complaining, you racist.
It also does not help that we many times insist, for reasons that range from the political to the delusional, that government employees refrain from doing their actual jobs. No matter what you pay a police officer, it won’t matter much if they fail to make arrests because the official policy for criminals is “catch and release” to avoid annoying the local Woke District Attorney—or embarrassing your city’s leaders (here’s looking at you, Washington, DC Democrats!). No matter what you pay your teachers, what really makes the difference is whether they are competent and caring—and whether the school holds students accountable for both their behavior and learning. No matter how many dollars we spend on more and more bureaucrats, it won’t improve our lives because the point of most government bureaucracies is to provide jobs for bureaucrats—that’s pretty much it.
We are being daily defrauded by what boils down to theft of services because faithfully performing many government jobs might annoy the easily annoyed, expose unwanted truths, or expose the graft that passes for policy in America today.
Many Americans are understandably impatient with the lack of arrests of former and present officials who have been responsible for wasting our money and driving our nation into catastrophic debt because these thieves will continue to enrich themselves with our money until they see there is a price to pay for the grift and graft that are an accepted part of our political system.
No one respects laws that are not enforced, and no one respects those who fail to enforce the very laws that protect us from the fraud permitted—or perpetuated—by those whom we trust with our votes or pay with our tax dollars. Big Government should be more accurately labeled Big Fraud, a gigantic and ruinous mechanism for stealing our money, destroying our nation, and crushing our futures.