{"id":1543776,"date":"2022-07-08T06:05:48","date_gmt":"2022-07-08T10:05:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1543776"},"modified":"2022-07-08T06:05:50","modified_gmt":"2022-07-08T10:05:50","slug":"illinois-lost-half-its-pandemic-stimulus-relief-to-fraud-and-scammers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/illinois-lost-half-its-pandemic-stimulus-relief-to-fraud-and-scammers\/","title":{"rendered":"Illinois Lost Half Its Pandemic Stimulus Relief to Fraud and Scammers"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">22<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fillinois-lost-half-its-pandemic-stimulus-relief-to-fraud-and-scammers%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1543776&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p><span>The federal government\u2019s multi-trillion-dollar \u201cstimulus\u201d efforts during the pandemic may go down as the biggest legislative failure in modern American history. Congress spent an astounding <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/fee.org\/articles\/federal-covid-spending-will-cost-41-870-per-taxpayer-did-you-see-that-much-in-benefit\/\"><span>$42,000 per federal taxpayer<\/span><\/a><span> (do you know anyone who received anywhere near that much in benefits?) and only successfully \u201cstimulated\u201d inflation. What\u2019s more, evidence continues to mount that the biggest beneficiaries of this binge were criminals and fraudsters.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>A <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.aei.org\/poverty-studies\/audit-finds-half-of-pandemic-unemployment-assistance-benefits-in-illinois-were-stolen\/\"><span>new analysis<\/span><\/a><span> from the American Enterprise Institute\u2019s Matt Weingarten reports that the state of Illinois lost half of the money it sent out in expanded pandemic unemployment benefits to scammers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Illinois\u2019s inspector general reports that the level of fraud it experienced was \u201cunprecedented\u201d and amounted to more than $1.8 billion lost.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>The Background<\/h2>\n<p><span>The program at issue here is the expanded unemployment benefits system created by the federal government back in March 2020. A bipartisan majority in Congress passed an expansion of existing state-level unemployment benefits to new groups of workers and added a $600\/week supplement on top of state-level benefits. (It was later reduced to $300\/week). The program was renewed multiple times but finally ended in September 2021.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>While it remained in place, this hastily-created system paid many unemployed people more <\/span><span>not<\/span><span> to work and <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/fee.org\/articles\/at-least-18-million-people-refused-to-return-to-work-because-of-generous-welfare-benefits-poll-shows\/\"><span>created massive labor disincentives<\/span><\/a><span> that hurt the economy. It also had little to no verification system and was simply designed to funnel as much taxpayer money out the door as quickly as possible.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span><a href=\"https:\/\/fee.org\/articles\/prisoner-scammers-and-rapper-nuke-bizzle-7-crazy-examples-of-covid-unemployment-fraud\/\">Wild examples<\/a> of fraud soon went viral, and we\u2019re now learning just how bad it was.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>A National Problem<\/h2>\n<p><span>While Illinois just provided a particularly acute example, fraud was rampant throughout the entire nationwide program and has added up to some truly shocking sums. Early estimates suggested that the feds lost $200 billion to fraud. To put that number in context, it\u2019s <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/fee.org\/articles\/federal-government-lost-5x-more-to-covid-stimulus-fraud-than-it-spent-on-vaccine-development-new-report-reveals\/\"><span>5 times more<\/span><\/a><span> than the federal government spent promoting the development of Covid-19 vaccines. And some <a href=\"https:\/\/insights.id.me\/viewpoint\/calculating-the-road-to-losing-400-billion-dollars\/\">estimates<\/a> suggest that the final amount lost could be closer to $400 billion.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The scale of this fraud is truly breathtaking. But it shouldn\u2019t actually be surprising.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>Why Government Waste is Inevitable<\/h2>\n<p><span>Whenever the government spends money, waste is inevitable. Why?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Well, as Nobel-Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman famously explained, the government is ultimately responsible for spending other peoples\u2019 money on other people. As a matter of incentives 101, that\u2019s not a recipe for the kind of frugality or quality assurance that\u2019s inherent when people shop for themselves or spend their own money.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cI can spend somebody else\u2019s money on somebody else,\u201d Friedman explained. \u201cAnd if I spend somebody else\u2019s money on somebody else, I\u2019m not concerned about how much it is, and I\u2019m not concerned about what I get. And that\u2019s government.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>This helps explains why so much government spending is wasteful, poorly targeted, and ineffective.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>So, the only way to avoid the government losing hundreds of billions to fraudsters is to stop letting it spend so much of our money in the first place.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n[embedded content]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The federal government\u2019s multi-trillion-dollar \u201cstimulus\u201d efforts during the pandemic may go down as the biggest legislative failure in modern American history. Congress spent an astounding $42,000 per federal taxpayer (do<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1387972,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1543776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1543776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1543776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1543776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1387972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1543776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1543776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1543776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}