A Modest Proposal to Prevent Taxpayer Dollars From Being Used to Support Fraud and Waste

Reports of massive fraud in Minnesota where taxpayer money has been used by Somali immigrants to enrich themselves and to support much of their home country, are only the most recent instances of the waste of hard earned taxpayer dollars.

Faceless bureaucrats play at being venture capitalists by funding unworkable ideas with little oversight and no accountability

Elon Musk's DOGE team found massive amounts of money being given to NGOs and government organizations alike, often to the detriment of the country. Support for illegal immigration, funding questionable activities in third world countries, even support for foreign terrorist organizations, not to mention medicare, welfare, and Social Security payments to unqualified recipients that consumed hundreds of billions of dollars.

Add to that the trillion dollars and more of direct and indirect costs the previous administration directed to "green" projects and initiatives, most of which failed to accomplish anything useful, or even anything at all, and it becomes obvious why American taxpayers feel their tax money is being wasted.

Faceless bureaucrats play at being venture capitalists by funding unworkable ideas with little oversight and no accountability. What does it matter if the venture fails. Unlike the private sector, there is always more money available to "invest" even if every idea fails. It must be nice to have a business where the customer has to buy your product at whatever price you set, and can be thrown in jail if they complain too loudly.

While I believe that we should have a strong military for our own defense and security, I don't think we should be paying much for someone else's strong military, especially if we have no national benefit from that support. The US has spent almost $200B on the Ukraine war alone, with nearly $130B going directly to Ukraine. How does that serve US interests in any positive way?

Likewise, government assistance in the form of foreign aid consumes large amounts of tax dollars with little or no ability of the average citizen to influence those expenditures. Typically, over $1.4T is allocated each year by various bureaucrats.

Whenever fraud and waste is brought to attention, the typical government response is to increase oversight on expenditures. This oversight requires more bureaucrats, consumes more of the budget, and makes the whole process of distribution less efficient and more expensive. Government will happily spend $1000 to ensure $1 is well spent. There are few who question whether those expenditures are necessary or return value proportional to the amount expended.

So how does that affect the average taxpayer? There are roughly 340M people in the US with about 160M in the workforce. If we assume that every worker is also a taxpayer, then $1B in tax dollars would be $6.25 per taxpayer. While that may not seem like much, we can look deeper. The $100B of fraud discovered in Minnesota recently would amount to $625 per taxpayer. Does that seem a bit more significant?

Costs of the Ukraine war would add an additional $1,250 to that amount, for a total of $1,875. How many taxpayers could put almost $2,000 to good use? But we aren't done yet. The Biden "green new deal" would take an additional $6,000 out of taxpayer's pockets. We're now up to $8,000 per taxpayer.

Adding in the costs of foreign aid, and taxpayers are looking at $14,000 each year that could have been used to start businesses, pay for food and housing, apply to a new home, and generally support their local economies. Some might argue that foreign aid is a valuable humanitarian expenditure, but it is made at the discretion of bureaucrats, and not by individual taxpayers. We are a generous people, but we like to be able to support those causes we choose, not those someone else chooses for us, especially when those choices do not reflect our values.

Starve the beast

We haven't even added in the costs of welfare fraud, of Social Security payments to those long dead, and all the myriad other improper government expenditures. When you are "managing" billion dollar budgets, errors in the second or third decimal place appear insignificant until you realize that those errors amount to hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

What should we do about the situation?

Answer: starve the beast. The taxpayer should not be an open limit credit card for national and state bureaucrats. DOGE pointed out billions of dollars of waste, and the DOJ is finding comparable amounts in fraud. Those amounts should be immediately applied to reduce individual worker taxes. While much of the waste and fraud has already been spent and is beyond recovery, we shouldn't be continuing such spending.

Most of us have strict budgets to maintain, and, unlike governments, can't vote ourselves raises or higher incomes. Government failures to maintain strict budgets with full and valid justification for every expenditure, should have serious consequences for poor stewardship of tax dollars. Bureaucrats should be at risk of losing their jobs for poor management, just like workers in the private sector.

Dollars that remain in a local economy are much better used than when those dollars are sucked into the bottomless pit of taxes. If governments have fewer tax dollars to spend on pet projects, there will automatically be fewer dollars available to be consumed by fraud and waste.

We might even see a reduction in the regulatory burdens that are such a drain on our economy. Fewer tax dollars means fewer bureaucrats to write and enforce new regulations. Fewer regulations means more dollars productively employed to create new wealth and prosperity.

President Trump has spoken of eliminating the income tax. That proposal has met with much opposition and derision, largely from within the government and among government supported institutions like many universities. How can you run a modern government without lots of money? What about all the programs and projects and vital activities that the institutional elite know are essential, but are unappreciated by the ignorant masses that are taxed to support them?

However would we support international conferences to discuss how to increase taxes to stop the climate from changing? However will we be able to support all the world's poor and huddled masses that have poured into our country? What about the millions of descendents of former slaves who deserve compensation for their ancestor's hardships? Never mind that the near universal institution of slavery means that almost everyone, black, white, yellow or brown has ancestors who were slaves.

The reasons--excuses actually--for confiscating through taxes a portion of the fruits of individual labors in order to support the partly baked ideas of a modern aristocracy are without limit. Like weeds in a garden that require constant attention to keep them from taking over, so too are the demands for more taxes.

Let those who have what they believe to be good ideas pay for them themselves. If the ideas are truly good and worthwhile, they should be able to convince others to contribute to their support. otherwise, let them wither and die.

That should include the government supported programs that have been such lucrative sources for fraud. In some ways, the fraudsters are almost blameless. It has been raining government soup. Who can fault them for setting out buckets. Perhaps it is time to turn off the soup pot.

David Robb is a practicing scientist and CTO of a small firm developing new security technologies for detection of drugs and other contraband.  Dave has published extensively in TheBlueStateConservative, and occasionally in American Thinker.