Minnesota’s biggest newspaper violates the first rule of holes.
Obviously stung by criticism of the paper’s laughable “fact-check” on the dollar amount of fraud stolen from taxpayers in Minnesota, the paper doubles down with this new entry,
How the Minnesota Star Tribune analyzed alleged fraud totals in Minnesota.
Still going with “alleged.” In this day-late explainer, the Star Tribune doesn’t show its work, it just describes it’s work in more words. I show my work,
The Star Tribune has a new fraud number, $218 million, up from their original $152 million. The now-lone reporter writes,
There’s no doubt that those schemes involved huge amounts of public money, but was it billions — with a “b”?
If the Star Tribune were to admit that the number begins with a “b” then they would have to admit that Pres. Trump correctly cited current estimates of the scandal. They won’t, so [in a later version of the article] they have to throw out 200 years of journalistic practice and foreswear use of any “estimates” or “projections.” They write,
To answer that question we conducted our own accounting based on court records, criminal charges and convictions across dozens of cases that have dominated headlines in the state for years.
They do not specify which of the dozens of food fraud cases they did include. They also do not explain why a dozen or so other frauds are omitted entirely from their analysis. The Star Tribune does admit,
That number is likely to grow as fraud investigations continue, but it is currently far short of both Trump’s claim and the figures commonly cited by prosecutors and widely reported by some local and national media outlets.
But minimizing the dollar figure by redefining the commonly understood meaning of words like “fraud” only serves to minimize the crimes themselves and deflect blame from those who were in charge.
Earlier today, the Star Tribune published a commentary under the headline,
Ramstad: Two lies Minnesotans can’t afford to keep telling
Columnist Evan Ramstad argues,
Minnesota’s prosperity is under assault by two falsehoods, present in the human services fraud of recent years and becoming visible now in the just-beginning 2026 political campaign.
The first lie is that most immigrants to Minnesota, who are mainly people of color, take more from the state — or nation — economically than they add to it. It’s mostly people on the political right who say this.
You see, this whole fraud scandal is just a smokescreen, a lie really, distracting from the state’s real issues. That certain immigrants groups subtract more than they add, economically, is a verifiable fact. Making that empirical observation is not a moral judgement. Ramstad argues that it is a moral judgement.
His concern regarding this debate is that it may “risk further slowing Minnesota’s population growth when it is already at its lowest rate.”
This represents the view that to grow the economy, you just need to grow the number of capita in the state. It’s the “population times $ per capita GDP.”
Ramstad beleives that the “real” issue being ignored is the state’s looming budget deficit. He writes as if the ongoing frauds (they’ve never stopped) have no role in the upward surprise on the spending side of the budget equation. He writes,
The general budget was supposed to fall from $69 billion to $67 billion. Now, it looks like it will rise to $71 billion.
If you look at the most recent state budget documents (p. 8), most of that “unexpected” increase in spending occurs in a single budget line-item: “forecasted services” within the state’s health and human servies budget area, a/k/a fraud central. The fraud problem and the budget deficit problem are one and the same.
We have forests, we have trees, and we need to start seeing both, all at the same time.
