Another day, another instance of mass fraud. Just in the last week, a bogus Minnesota nonprofit, Partners in Nutrition (PiN), agreed to pay $18.5 million for stealing from a child food distribution program. In Ohio, “Eighteen Medicaid providers across the state … have been accused of stealing more than $355,000 from the government healthcare program for the needy.” Additionally, Vice President J.D. Vance recently “announced … that 750,000 people allegedly fraudulently enrolled in Affordable Care Act insurance plans will be kicked off the programs,” a move that will “save American taxpayers $2.2 billion.”
More and more, today’s welfare programs are becoming better known for enabling egregious fraud than for helping people in need, and this is understandably becoming an important issue for voters. Politically speaking, this is good news for reform-minded Republicans and bad news for spendthrift Democrats who want even more entitlement spending.
Surprisingly, the person publicly pointing this out is none other than New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Speaking at the Urban 20 Mayors Summit, the socialist theater-kid extraordinaire declared, “Quality of life has come to be seen as somehow a right-wing concern. Efficiency … has been taken on as a right-wing concern, rooting out fraud and waste, a right-wing concern.” Meanwhile, Democrat politicians like Mamdani are not taken seriously on such issues.
This might be due to the many brazen examples of fraud in blue states that have surfaced over the past year. Besides Minnesota and Ohio, Chris Rufo continues to uncover widespread fraud in California and even criminal conspiracies among leftist NGOs. And in Mamdani’s own city of New York, the biggest source of work for New Yorkers is home health care, a dubious form of employment that is tailor-made for fraudsters.
It also doesn’t help that unassimilated immigrants make up a large number of people committing the fraud. As conservative podcaster Matt Walsh discussed in a recent episode, so many millions of dollars in Covid grants and loans went to foreign fraudsters who used the money to buy mansions and luxury cars and, in one case, to assassinate the president of Haiti. Apparently, some even wrote rap songs bragging about their ill-gotten fortunes.
Naturally, leftists such as Mamdani see this as a mere messaging problem. It can’t be that Democrat policies facilitate mass fraud; they simply aren’t applying the proper communication techniques for these issues: “If you are staring at an example of social disorder or social inefficiency, and the left refuses to explain either why it has happened or how they will fix it, then the right gets to point at someone in the immediate area and say, ‘That’s who did it.’”
Presumably, the way Democrats take back this issue is to whine that conservatives are unfairly “pouncing” on them and make vain proposals that usually involve throwing more money at these issues.
It’s also notable that Mamdani uses euphemisms like “social inefficiency” to denote major problems like homelessness, fraud, crime, and blight. This subtly suggests that such crises are simply the result of some fixable error in an otherwise functional system. Surely, they can’t be the result of a faulty governing philosophy and an incompetent government.
But this is exactly why Democrats have a fraud problem. It has nothing to do with using the right language or enacting the right policy, and everything to do with Democrats’ core beliefs. This explains not only why most American cities continually suffer from dysfunction but also why fraud will proliferate and expand if Democrats win the majority in Congress this November.
First and foremost, Democrats work off the assumption that material inequality accounts for all of society’s problems, even nonmaterial ones, and thus conclude that taking from the rich to give to the poor will solve all of these problems. For example, if homeless people are shooting up heroin on Skid Row in Los Angeles, additional resources must be allocated to the organizations that purport to help the homeless. This, in turn, incentivizes fraud: Organizations will collect money off of a problem they pretend to treat, individuals will collect benefits off an injustice they pretend to suffer from, and the original issue will fester and grow.
Democrats usually couple this assumption with the related assumption that material inequality results from systemic injustice. The poor are poor because they are unfairly oppressed in some way, and the rich are rich because they are unfairly privileged in some way. Consequently, the Democrat politician will try to fix the system by granting privileges to the poor (i.e., entitlement funding, affirmative action, enforcing a lower legal standard, etc.) and removing privileges from the rich (i.e., higher taxes, selective law enforcement, legalized discrimination, etc.). Once again, this encourages fraud since the poor and their advocates can always claim to be victims of injustice (after all, how would one prove otherwise?) and demand ever more public assistance.
And it isn’t just wealth disparity that Democrats attribute to systemic injustice, but all disparity: academic achievement, professional competency, personal virtue, basic intelligence, and even athletic ability. Because of an unfair system, some people are smart, beautiful, skilled, and heroic while others are dumb, ugly, useless, and depraved. None of it results from having the right values, adopting the right habits, and putting in the right amount of effort. The system determines it all.
In practice, this means Democrats will instinctively swap meritocracy for some other system, usually one based on the Marxist principle of “each according to his needs.” Incompetent, corrupt leaders will hire incompetent, corrupt deputies to run departments that are staffed with incompetent, corrupt employees. Their whole purpose is to soak up funds and redistribute wealth, not fix the “social inefficiencies” that arise.
This is why, for Democrat politicians, institutions and projects are treated more as jobs programs than organized efforts to improve communities. As The Federalist’s Chris Bray observed in a Substack piece on California’s nonexistent high-speed rail that has somehow cost around $15 billion so far, “If you give money to people, then people have money, and that’s, you know, more bigger. For the economy! Quite literally, the state’s political argument for the project is that they’re giving a bunch of money away, which causes prosperity.” When this is the calculation, fraud is not just likely but inevitable.
Altogether, no matter what they say or promise, Democrats cannot and will not fix the problems that matter to voters. It goes against their nature and lies well beyond their capabilities. Mass fraud is a feature of their ideology, not a bug. Their response to every problem will be to raise taxes, waste money, and then blame systemic injustice — and President Trump, of course.
Although American voters have every reason to grumble about affordability and other issues, they should not be fooled into thinking that putting Democrats into office will fix anything. As a matter of principle, Democrats will make every problem worse and make any future reform all the more difficult to implement. Hopefully, most voters will recognize this in time and choose accordingly in the upcoming midterms.
