It’s Not Just Minnesota. The Vast Majority Of Daycare Is A Scam

​The Trump administration announced it is pausing all child-care payments to Minnesota in light of explosive revelations about Somali-saturated fraud rings siphoning billions from federal welfare programs. State officials in Ohio, where the second-largest Somali population resides in the United States, are begging for a federal fraud investigation there.

Viral videos of YouTuber Nick Shirley visiting childless “day care centers” in Minnesota expose that Democrats’ two-century practice of buying votes with welfare has now degraded below even offering a functioning cover story. To no thinking person’s surprise, the investigation reveals Democrats’ “affordable childcare” quest seeks the same as every other welfare program: kickbacks for the Democrat political machine. This is a major reason the Founders made federal welfare programs unconstitutional.

As shocking as the estimated $9 billion theft in Minnesota is, it rests upon an even deeper level of scammery. For if it is fraud to take taxpayer money for childcare while not providing it, isn’t it also fraud to take taxpayer money for early childhood development that actually damages early childhood development?

The truth is, “affordable childcare” is itself a scam. The billions spent on daycare result in worse outcomes for society than if these programs never existed. Industry researchers have known and lied about this for decades. Yes, that makes them frauds, too, and their mark — is there any other mark on the planet? — the endlessly spigoted American taxpayers.

$240 Billion for Zero Benefits

Americans have been inundated with preschool and daycare propaganda for an entire lifetime, all to serve the scam that is government displacement of families. We’ve been sold the endless growth of family-displacing welfare programs as good for children and society. Well, they are not good for children or society.

“Affordable childcare” has been a Democrat campaign demand much longer than the Clintons’ infamous “it takes a village” efforts in the ’90s. The notoriously ineffective Head Start federal preschool program was a key part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society scam that, as Christopher Caldwell detailed so well, traded the rest of Americans’ constitutional ways of life for bankrupting welfare hush money.

From 1965, when it began, to 2020, Head Start has cost American taxpayers $240 billion, according to a Heritage Foundation report. The program sold as an educational boost for America’s poorest children has done nothing in 60 years to improve education outcomes for those children, according to federal evaluators. Yet it currently gets $9 billion in taxpayer funds per year. Pretty scammy!

As a poignant indicator of what a waste early childhood subsidies are, even The Atlantic noticed in 2015 a National Bureau of Economic Research study that found watching Sesame Street was just as effective as attending Head Start — which is to say, it slightly improved school “readiness” with no lasting effects. A big difference, of course, is that Head Start costs taxpayers an average of $10,000 per kid per year, while Sesame Street is capable of much cheaper and fully tax-deductible private funding.

Billions for Higher Crime and Mental Troubles

All the other gold-standard evaluations of preschool and daycare programs find the same: billions spent for no or even worse outcomes. A birth-to-school universal childcare program in Quebec — exactly the kind of program Democrats keep demanding — has led to higher anxiety, lower school performance, worse behavior, and higher crime rates. Similar findings have arisen in Sweden and in U.S. studies.

The “highest-quality” state preschool programs show any of very limited academic benefits to kids fade out by about third grade. Some even lead to declines in academic achievement. This means all those tax dollars are wasted, too — if the goal is to benefit children and society, of course. As scams to launder taxpayer money to Democrat organizers, they are very effective!

As with apparently every federal program, Head Start has shockingly high rates of unlawful fraud. A 2020 Heritage Foundation report notes federal investigators found in 2019 that one-third of Head Start providers they probed potentially committed enrollment fraud — meaning, offered to enroll children who did not qualify. In some cases, preschool staff appeared to have falsified or hid information showing applicants were ineligible, presumably so they could fraudulently obtain taxpayer funding: “More than half of the tested Head Start centers failed to identify ineligible families.”

Mother Wounds Are Real and Significant

Most troublingly of all, research and common sense observe that separating small children from their families for many hours a week induces worse outcomes for them and therefore all of us. Thanks to taxpayer-provided daycare and preschool, we literally appear to be paying billions to increase mental and physical health problems, violence, poor school performance, and crime.

This is in large part because children separated from their mothers are stressed by the separation, as anyone who has ever babysat a small child knows. The longer littles miss mother, the more agitated and sad they get, even when they are with a kind, capable, and attentive caregiver. It’s fine, even good practice, if little ones miss mama for a few hours occasionally. Mother comes back soon, and they repair their bond. But if the stress is chronic, as in every weekday, it risks long-lasting emotional and physical health problems. Those we all pay for.

Beyond long-lasting higher aggression, anxiety, and criminality, documented negative effects of substantial nonparental care for children under six include ADHD-type symptoms, which can persist for life. It’s not a coincidence ADHD diagnoses are skyrocketing in tandem with a dramatic increase in mother separation (of course there are other large factors). Here’s another, better known, example: children in daycare are far more prone to earaches. It’s a major reason ear tube insertion has become one of the most common outpatient procedures for American kids.

Just these two conditions alone account for much misery for children, their families, and their communities, as well as a lot of health expenses we are all paying via insurance premiums and taxes. Many researchers know this, but once again the truth about children’s suffering gets in the way of Democrat power grubbing. So government grants pay for shoddy “research” that sells very well to a press teeming with working women taught in college it’s basically demonic torture to pause their low-wage, no-respect timecard-punching to mother a baby, and some men married to such women.

So U.S. taxpayers have spent hundreds of billions more on daycare than even Somalis have apparently been able to pilfer in Minnesota. Meanwhile, research and common sense has repeatedly demonstrated these massive societal efforts would have been far better spent encouraging American mothers to raise their own children and decreasing government burdens on families such as cutting the health welfare that increases hospital and insurer profits while stealing Americans blind. (Health “care” — there’s another entire freaking industry of interlocking scams spawned by corporate-government incest.)

Daycare shell companies in Minnesota that appear to have laundered billions not only to foreign terrorists but also domestic politics are, yes, obvious fraud. But the deeper fraud is government-sponsored daycare itself.