Democrats sometimes win the battle of ideas with big promises of what government should do. They lose the war when we see what it actually does.
One of the GOP’s core principles is: The government can’t be trusted with your money. Even when it’s doing the jobs only the government can do, like the military or the police, there’s always waste and people gaming the system, from $900 hammers to excessive overtime.
It gets so much worse when you make the government bigger and design it around giving people free stuff and building things the market wouldn’t buy.
Democrats get electedpromising this, then keep reminding us why they can’t be trusted.
Millions & billions
The latest example comes from former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s universal preschool program. As The Post has reported,the city has doled out $99.3 million and counting to rent 28 buildings for new preschools. Half a decade and two mayors later, none of them opened.
It’s easy to blame this on de Blasio. But it’s a nationwide pattern, especially in deep-blue cities and states where voters don’t punish incompetence and politicians get rewarded for letting their friends raid the public treasury.
California spent $37 billion to solve homelessness, and the problem got worse. Nobody knows where all the money went. The state has spent over $14 billion since 2008 building high-speed rail, and has yet to lay a single mile of track; passenger service is still at least five years away, while the projected cost has quadrupled from original estimates.
In Minnesota, on Tim Walz’s watch, the state drowned in fraud: Feeding Our Future, a nonprofit that stole most of the money earmarked for school lunches, phony day care centers with no kids, and more than $1 billion in fraud in housing subsidies, Medicaid and autism services, leading to dozens of federal indictments.
Walz responded by trying to expand every program that was bleeding phony dollars — including money scammed by Somalis who were sending it back home to finance terrorist groups.
A 2023 Associated Press analysis found more than $200 billion in theft and fraud from COVID-era relief, and that’s not even counting money that was just wasted when local governments figured out that they’d rather spend leftover federal money than give it back. State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds totaling $350 billion were doled out under Joe Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, and a GAO report found that blue states burned through the money faster than red states.
House Speaker Mike Johnsonhas estimated that the Medicaid program spends $50 billion a year in fraudulent or misdirected payments.
More tax, more fraud
Our money leaks out of the system in numerous ways. Government programs that make legal promises of payment are bad at sniffing out fraud, and the bigger the program, the harder it is to look at any given expense.
Unionized government workers get overpaid, and privatizing their jobs without shrinking the program often just means shifting the boondoggles to contractors and other non-governmental organizations — all of whom contribute to the campaigns of the people who vote them money.
Meanwhile, red tape ties up actually building or accomplishing anything, and there’s too little incentive to change that when people get paid to be on a project, not to finish it.
Now, we have Democrats arguing for a “wealth tax” to pay for programs and prevent rich people from just wasting the money. But why should we keep shoveling more money into the same old holes in the ground, knowing we’ll learn a few years later that so much of it has just vanished or been used to do nothing?
Given more of other people’s money, Democrats will just waste more of it — or let it get stolen by their friends.
Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review. X: @BaseballCrank
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