[advisedwang]

The reason that "the left" is rolling eyes at the fuss being made over this fraud is:

1. The fraud is in fact being investigated, people are being charged and convicted. Despite this, rightwing media institutions are acting as if fraud is being ignored and maybe even covered up and encouraged because

2. This is just another example of the decades long project by those who have lots of money and don't want to see it go to takes to paint social programs as a money-pipe from good hardworking people to fraud and waste.

[ryandrake]

It's wild how distorted everyone's bubble is. If you go to conservative news sites or r/Conservative, you'd think this daycare business was the biggest problem that has ever faced the United States since 9/11. Every other article is about daycare and Somalis. Like, really? This is the big story of 2025???

In the real world, this maybe makes page 3 of the "crime" section of the newspaper for a single day.

[arduanika]

Fair enough. But the reason that "the right" is not letting go of the story is:

1. The fraud was not in fact being investigated seriously enough until this kid, even while lacking the basics of journalism as Patrick describes here, forced the issue.

2. This is just another example of the decades long trend where more and more bad patterns and outcomes can persist for far too long because the normal checks are fended off with spurious accusations of racism.

There's some variation on how "the right" would handle (2). The center-right wants to shore up our culture of color-blindness to patch these vulnerabilities. The far-right wants to do away with egalitarianism altogether, and just go back to plain old racism. If we can't figure out the former, we might well end up with the latter.

(My reading is that Patrick falls squarely in the "center-right" here, fwiw. Then again, it can be hard to decode his exact subtext from under all the polite circumlocutions. Reading his stuff is something of an acquired skill and/or taste.)

[zahlman]

> The fraud is in fact being investigated, people are being charged and convicted.

And as explained in TFA, this is inefficient and ineffective even in theory:

> So-called “pay-and-chase”, where we put the burden on the government to disallow payments for violations retrospectively, has been enormously expensive and ineffective. Civil liability bounces off of exists-only-to-defraud LLC. Criminal prosecutions, among the most expensive kinds of intervention the government is capable of doing short of kinetic war, result in only a ~20% reduction in fraudulent behavior. Rearchitecting the process to require prior authorization resulted in an “immediate and permanent” 68% reduction.

> Despite this, rightwing media institutions are acting as if fraud is being ignored and maybe even covered up and encouraged because

Which is a reasonable characterization of the situation given the scale of the fraud and the fact that it's still going on, in such a blatant manner.

We're talking about total fraud on the order of $10b, and some significant fraction of that money has presumably been sent back to Somalia. We're talking here about amounts that would represent a significant percentage of Somalia's entire GDP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somalia#Economy).

> This is just another example of the decades long project by those who have lots of money and don't want to see it go to takes to paint social programs as a money-pipe from good hardworking people to fraud and waste.

"The left" clearly has a vested interest in that not happening; therefore, it is also in their interest to take appropriate actions against fraud as they might learn about from the financial industry.