Government Workers Yawning As Taxpayer Dollars Are Stolen
There's a lot of opportunity for theft of pandemic-related funding and plenty of people are seizing it.

A few examples of obvious fraud, per a Bank of America report: Hundreds of unemployment debit cards going to the same address, multiple cards using the same contact phone number or address, and benefits issued to babies and children as well as very elderly people not likely to be working.

Bank of America estimates that there's more than $2 billion in fraud in California's expanded pandemic unemployment benefits system. "The bank has identified 640,000 potentially fraudulent accounts," writes Brad Polumbo at FEE:

Michigan unemployment worker Brandi Hawkins was charged with allegedly having distributed more than $2 million in fraudulent funds. That's right: $2 million swindled from taxpayers by just one person! One can only wonder how many more like Hawkins got away with it.

Why does endemic fraud so consistently plague government welfare systems? It's due to a simple principle explained by Nobel-prize-winning economist Milton Friedman in his book Free to Choose.

He identified the four types of spending. You can spend your money on yourself, in which case you'll be quite judicious with it. You can also spend your money on someone else, or someone else's money on yourself. In either case you'll still have a strong incentive to spend the money responsibly.

Yet Friedman identified a fourth scenario.

"If I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I'm not concerned about how much it is, and I'm not concerned about what I get," the economist wrote. "And that's government."As long as California voters keep voting for progressive legislators who think the government can solve all our problems, billions of their dollars will keep getting flushed down the drain.

In this case, legislators rushed to expand unemployment benefits to convince voters they were doing something to help people amid a crisis. Yet the government bureaucrats handling California's unemployment program weren't particularly concerned about where billions of taxpayer dollars actually went.

But that's Big Government for you in a nutshell. As long as California voters keep voting for progressive legislators who think the government can solve all our problems, billions of their dollars will keep getting flushed down the drain.