[ska]

> Should I believe you, or my own lying eyes?

Neither of course! Either believing your own experience to generalize well or believing someone random on the internet would be crazy talk.

What you should believe is the research on this, which admittedly is difficult with anything this politicized. What I base it on is a combination of reading some of that (though I'm no expert) and knowing some people quite well who have had state level responsibility for programs of this kind.

Fraud, and "Steves" certainly exist, but it seems that the numbers are small enough they don't have much systemic impact, there are many much bigger issues.

That's what I meant by "to a first approximation"; not that it doesn't exist, but the effect isn't of 1st order importance.