When You’re In A Hole, Stop Digging

Authored by J. Peder Zane via RealClearPolitics,

President Trump was onto something when he replaced Joe Biden’s White House portrait with a mocking picture of an autopen. Given our recent history of failed leadership, why stop there?

To truly capture the impact of this century’s presidents, let’s replace George W. Bush’s photo with a picture of a small hole and a shovel. Instead of Barack Obama’s dazzling smile, how about a deeper hole with a longer shovel? And maybe an earth mover before a crater in Donald Trump’s first term. Maybe stick with Biden’s autopen as a tip of the cap to a great idea, although a shot of the Grand Canyon would fit as well. As for Trump’s second term, if things keep going in the same direction, the art department might start working on a drawing of Alfred E. Neumann with his famous tagline, “What, Me Worry”?

If this sounds harsh, consider the fiscal abyss these men have plunged us into. Since George W. Bush’s presidency, the national debt has been widely acknowledged as one of our nation’s chief challenges. In 2000, it was equal to 55% of our GDP; it now stands at 121%. The oxymoronically named Government Accountability Office projects that percentage will double by 2053.

It costs about $1 trillion per year just to service our $38.5 trillion debt, which is still growing at close to $2 trillion per year.

Presidents can’t do this alone. Congress passes the budgets, and the American people just go along with the charade. Everybody wants what they want; nobody is willing to sacrifice. The modern welfare state launched by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, supercharged by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society – and expanded by every president and Congress since the 1960s – has become a massive system of transfer payments that now sends some 72.5 million Americans government assistance.

Even if we cut our leaders some slack for making entitlement reform the Godot of modern politics, their intentional unwillingness to even pluck the low-hanging fruit of obvious fraud and abuse is impossible to defend.

When the ongoing investigation of massive fraud in Minnesota became big news in recent weeks, President Trump did not take the opportunity to focus the nation’s attention on the huge amount of federal dollars being swiped by con artists and grifters. Instead of calling for a top-to-bottom review of expensive programs, he cast the fraud as an immigration issue – falsely suggesting that all would be well if we hadn’t admitted so many Somali immigrants.

The truth is, most everybody has their snout in the trough.

Right now, Congress is debating the future of enhanced Obamacare subsidies passed in 2021: Democrats want to extend them, Republicans want to spend some of the money in other ways. What no one is addressing in any serious way is the strong evidence of massive fraud in the program. Earlier this year, RealClearInvestigations reported on a study that found that an estimated 12 million enrollees had not filed a single claim in 2024 – suggesting that brokers and insurance companies may be adding phantom patients to juice profits. In a separate effort, the GAO reports that it has tested Obamacare’s verification system by submitting 24 fictional applications during the last two years – almost all of them were approved for expensive benefits. Reason magazine reported that the GAO auditors also “found more than 66,000 Social Security numbers attached to records showing more than 366 days of health insurance coverage – an indicator that those Social Security numbers may have been used multiple times in the same year. Additionally, GAO found more than 58,000 Social Security numbers matching death records in the Social Security Administration’s database. More than $94 million in tax credits were delivered to those accounts.”

Meanwhile, a series of reports in the Washington Post suggests rampant fraud in benefits paid to veterans. Where a 100% disability rating used to be a relatively rare status given to those who suffered truly debilitating and disfiguring injuries, today 1.5 million of the roughly 6 million veterans receiving disability payments have that classification – “a nearly ninefold increase since 2021.” Part of this increase, the Post reports, is driven by a growing industry, “steeped in hucksterism and fraud,” that recruits and coaches “to pile on benefits,” through what appears to be a rubber-stamp government review system.

Meanwhile, a Wall Street Journal series has documented rampant fraud in Medicaid and Medicare. One article reportedthat health insurers “collected at least $4.3 billion over three years for [hundreds of thousands of] patients who were enrolled – and paid for – in other states.” Another article reported that “Medicare Advantage insurers diagnosed patients with conditions that triggered extra payments of $50 billion from 2019 to 2021, even though no doctor ever treated the diseases.”

Despite its crushing costs, America’s vast welfare state is not going away. Although it is more likely that fiscal catastrophe rather than courageous leadership will one day ignite necessary reforms, in the meantime we might soften that day of reckoning by addressing the bad actors sucking us dry.

Some advice to our future leaders: When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.