Scamming government money is a crime that everyone should be furious about. It’s taking money that should benefit everyone, so reducing the standard of living for the whole population.
Investigations have found fraud in different cities where government money has been stolen. For example, in Minneapolis, it was reported that up to $110 million of public money had been fraudulently claimed by about 10 child daycare centers. And later in New York, some $190 million of fraud in the adult daycare sector was reported.
If you’re a US taxpayer, fraud like this should make you furious. Though the figures above came from investigations by a single person and so we shouldn’t try to extrapolate the level of fraud across the country.
Still, let’s do exactly that. Based on estimates, the US government spends $25 billion on childcare services and $8 billion on adult daycare centers each year.
Obviously, that can’t all be fraud, but as we’re guessing, let’s make a guess that even the most cynical of us would find implausible. So let’s say half of all child and adult daycare spending goes to non-existent people. That would mean that every year, $16.5 billion of government money is robbed by scammers. Let’s round it up to $20 billion of fraud.
If all this fraud was stopped, every single person in the US would have an extra $58.82 every year. Or put another way, an extra 16 cents each day.
Clearly what we’ve described would be a huge fraud, but tackling it wouldn’t make much financial difference to the average American. Still, that’s no reason not to take action.
But, why stop there? From 1989 to the end of 2025, the US economy doubled in size in real terms. That same period saw the wealthiest 1% of Americans capture another 9.1% of all US wealth, giving them a total share of 31.9%. For some reason, the poorest 50% of Americans saw their share of US wealth drop from 3.5% to 2.5%.
Even though many of them were the workers who grew the US economy. Doesn’t feel like a great reward for their hard work, does it? In fact, doesn’t it feel like a fraud, where they worked harder and got less in return?
Add together the 1% they lost and the 9.1% the wealthiest 1% took, and that’s $104,118 that’s gone astray in this fraud perpetrated by the wealthy. Yet the wealthy want Americans to focus on the fraud in care schemes. Fraud that we know costs each American less than $59 every year.
It would take 1,770 years for the average American to recover the $104,118 they lost to the wealthy at the rate of $58.82 per year.
So, who’s really defrauding the American people.
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