Our politicians are unpopular because they do nothing to help us, and when they explicitly help us it's framed as lazy poor people looking for handouts. It makes no sense.
Don't forget the "1% of the recipients are fraudulent, therefore the other 99% must spend 10 hours on paperwork and 6 months waiting for the benefits to start, with a 30% chance of rejection" approach.
> Don't forget the "1% of the recipients are fraudulent
It’s complicated. Having 1% fraudulent recipients despite having very thorough and deep vetting processes should be a clue that fraud is a big problem.
The fallacy is assuming that the fraud rate would stay the same if we removed the checks. It would not. The 1% fraud rate is only what gets through the current checks. The more you remove the checks, the higher the fraud rate.
When systems remove all fraud checks, the amount of fraud is hard to fathom if you’ve never been on the side of a fraud detection effort.
There's a couple of fallacies embedded here. For example, that there is a thorough and deep vetting process that is also impartial (vs being invested in denying benefits).
Also the assumption that an application that is denied == fraud. Programs are incredibly complex, and requirements are a moving target. I can imagine someone going to renew based on their understanding of the program, and inadvertently being flagged as fraud because some requirement changed (which in turn might have been incorrectly conveyed because the requirements are complex and even state staffers may not understand them all).
Some of this is down to the DOGE definition of "fraud, waste, abuse" as "anything we do not like." Using that definition, you can find fraud anywhere.
Unfortunately the US doesn't have a high-trust society anymore, so paperwork is a necessary evil to prevent malicious foreign actors from wiping us clean. (See: the recent Somalian autism claims scams in Minnesota).
It probably starts when one of the only two viable political parties stops undermining everything possibly good in this country in their effort to prove government doesn't work.
The fraudulent provider(s) bribed parents to get their kids diagnosed autistic. As, a result, autism diagnoses of children in this community are ~3x the background rate:
Interesting, my understanding was that the Somali parents were mad that their children’s autism, which wasn’t presenting the same way as the kind of standard Rain Man type of autism wasn’t being characterized correctly.
You were very wrong. Might want to consider where you get your news.
"Often, parents threatened to leave Smart Therapy and take their children to other autism centers if they did not get paid higher kickbacks. Several larger families left Smart Therapy after being offered larger kickbacks by other autism centers."
These can simply be different groups of Somali parents, for what it's worth. Presumably some Somali kids are truly autistic and not participating in the fraud scheme.
"The total amount of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) improper payments for Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 was an estimated $10.5 billion, or 11.7% of total benefits paid."
There’s no reason to assume it would be as low as 10% without strict checks. It could easily be 90% or more. We already see big regional difference for tax and medical fraud which likely reflects different enforcement levels and knowledge about how to skirt them.
But you're not going to get 5-10% fraud. Already there is significant disability fraud way past your 1% number even in our strict system. e.g. there are counties in the US where almost 1 in 5 working age adults is on disability because they are supposedly too disabled to work.
Most people won't commit fraud in an honest system, but that flips rapidly when they see fraud being tolerated. You make it easy to defraud the program and the fraudsters will pile in. Your staff will be overwhelmed and 90% of the applications will be fraudulent. Just look at what happened with the PPP program during covid. It's estimated that $200 billion was lost to fraud.
Washington state employment department lost $645 million in a matter of weeks in spring 2025 when they reduced fraud detection. Normally they spend $2-3 billion a year. Making some wild projections, that's 77% fraud rate?
Neither major US political party has a great track record here. On balance, I prefer one over the other, as I'm sure you do too. But they're both pretty far off from my ideal set of policies.
