Three (3) items published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal touch on different aspects of the fraud crisis gripping Minnesota.
From the Editorial Board,
The Great Entitlement State Grift:
The giant Minnesota fraud shows that GOP reformers are right.
The Board poses the timely question,
What happens when welfare becomes not a temporary hand up but an ingrained expectation of American life? For an ugly glimpse, look at the astonishing fraud unfolding in Minnesota.
The Board runs through the basic facts of the multi-billion-dollar frauds, of which you, the reader, are all-too-familiar.
Minnesota’s “nation-leading” Scandinavian-style, cradle-to-grave, guaranteed-income welfare system has ended up being the state’s downfall. The Board writes,
Mr. Trump is highlighting that the alleged Minnesota scammers are ethnic Somalis. It’s true that Minnesota’s generous welfare state has become a magnet for Somali immigrants. But the main problem here isn’t ethnicity or migration. It’s the incentives for indolence and fraud at the heart of the welfare state. All that free money with few guardrails is an invitation to theft.
Getting to the heart of the matter,
Democrats won’t acknowledge fraud because they want more Americans on the dole. Welfare is central to their political business model.
Also yesterday, around the same time, the Journal published an opinion piece by Kimberley Strassel, under the headline,
The Lesson of Minnesota’s Fraud:
Republicans have an opportunity to run against an out-of-control welfare state.
Her advice? Echoing the Board, the recommends downplaying the Somali angle and focusing on the broken welfare system, as she writes,
And of a state that preened as a model of social welfare, its own lavish benefits drawing many immigrants, and invited a plundering.
Specifically,
But Minnesota raises to alarm level a separate need for reset: The system itself—the government machine—is broken. Its heaving, duplicative federal-state programs, awash in forms and bureaucracies and ancient mainframes, has already suffered Soviet-style collapse. The system serves more as a cash machine for criminals than a safety net for the needy.
All true. Her bottom line,
The argument: We need to move many people off government dependency not just for moral and societal reasons, but because government has an obligation—to taxpayers and to the truly needy—to right-size and return to a system that can function.
I agree with her that it’s time to reimagine government.
Later last night, the Journal published (nonpaywall version) a news piece under the headline,
A Sprawling Fraud Scandal Puts Minnesota’s Somali Community in the Spotlight
The Journal reports on the basics of the scandals, which you already know. My favorite line from the piece, referring to Gov. Tim Walz,
His office didn’t respond to a request for comment Thursday.
Expect to see that repeated until November 2026.
