Photograph Source: Office of Governor Tim Walz & Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan – Public Domain

Simple question folks: how much money was stolen in the fraud hyped by Republicans and media clown Nick Shirley? My guess is that if we did a poll of highly knowledgeable people, those who regularly follow the news closely, we would get a range of answers from less than $1 billion to $20 billion. Who knows where we would end up with the larger public? Trump and some of the MAGA crew might even throw out numbers in the trillions.

I’m not picking on people’s ignorance. The point is whether or not this should have been a career-ending scandal for Tim Walz absolutely depends on the number. There will always be fraud in any government social program, just like there is some level of fraud in everything in the private sector.

The question must always be how much? Sometimes even high levels of fraud are apparently tolerated. As I noted previously, the Inspector General of the Small Business Administration (SBA) identified $200 billion of potentially fraudulent payments in the Paycheck Protection Program, an emergency pandemic started in Trump’s first term. This would have been more than 15 percent of the money that went out the door.

That massive level and........

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