But if you read the cited source of how Swanson came up with that number he said it wasn't just for over-billing (claiming more kids than the places actually had).
Instead, by his estimation, the employees working are not actually working because 'children are unsupervised, running from room to room while adult “employees” spend hours in hallways chatting with other adults' and so all of the funds to those providers are fraudulent. [1]
I think it's pretty easy to criticize the logic for that 50% fraud rate number without requiring criminal convictions.
[1] https://www.auditor.leg.state.mn.us/sreview/ccap.pdf#page=16
(I can't speak for Patrick's politics, only for mine.)
I don't even know where this belief comes from. I'm certainly not aware of any historical scenario where authoritarian regimes end when their opponents finally embody perfect behavior above reproach.
There was active prosecution ongoing literally right up until Shirly's video. That's taking the matter seriously.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020s_Minnesota_fraud_scandals
Oh yeah, the prosecution was sooo active that all the daycares listed as operational and receiving funding, had no kids in them, had blacked out or boarded up windows, misspelled signs, and if you went in to ask for enrollment 3 angry men would come out shouting at you. How many legit daycares have you seen that look like that?
Nick did a day worth of shooting, didn't follow up, and didn't check basic things like hours of operation.
Shirley gets acknowledged to have "poor epistemic standards" (which is an almost euphemistic way of describing his approach) but Patrick goes on to say that "the journalism develops one bit of evidence...." and even appears to insinuate the NYT erred in reporting it in the context of the Minnesota government's response that the state's own compliance checks had found them open shortly afterwards but that some of them were under investigation.
There's an interesting point to be made that detailed, bipartisan evidence collected by suitably qualified officials that some daycenters were closed at times they were claimed to be open gets less attention than a YouTuber with an agenda rocking up at nurseries at what may or may not have been their opening times, but that's not how it's actually expressed. Rather it seems to be arguing for face value judgements of his video and against journalists that felt compelled to point out that whilst evidence of daycare fraud by Somalis in Minnesota definitely existed, Shirley's videos probably shouldn't be considered part of it.
Of all the things that threaten the future of mainstream reporting, YouTubers running round Ohio for an hour trying to find people who think Haitians are eatinng the local pets isn't one of them.
How does one wandering around with a camera affect the fact that the daycares had blacked out or boarded up windows, misspelled signs, and if you went in to ask for enrollment then 3 angry men would come out shouting at you?
Do you even hear yourself? Are they Schrodinger's daycares? Do they become compliant the moment you stop filming them?
How does having a camera impact the daycare having a misspelled sign and boarded up windows?
No I'm not, you just don't like the answer. But at least you've edited to remove the "3 guys yelling at you" portion as I think even you can see how that might be a reasonable thing to do to a creep going around you business filming everything.
> daycare having a misspelled sign and boarded up windows?
The answer to this question is simple, a poor one. And I suspect that a daycare that primarily gets it's funds from people using government welfare likely isn't rolling in the dough. Broken windows are expensive to fix, boards are cheap. A misspelled sign is embarrassing but again could easily be something that the owner of the facilities just wasn't assed to pay to replace and properly fix.
My spouse worked for years in that sort of daycare which is why it's unsurprising to me that a daycare in that state exists. She, for example, did a full summer in Utah without AC while the kids were fed baloney sandwiches every day. Her's wasn't a daycare committing fraud, it was just an owner that was cutting costs at every corner to make sure their own personal wealth wasn't impacted.
A shitty daycare isn't an indicator of fraud. It's an indicator that the state has low regulation standards for daycares. Lots of states have that, and a lot of these places end up staying in operation because states decide that keeping open an F grade daycare is cheap and better for the community vs closing it because it's crap quality. They certainly don't often want to take control of such a business and they know a competently ran one isn't likely to replace it if it is shutdown.
Was your spouse also one of the all-male crews that those totally-not-a-scam MN daycares typically have?
How many legit daycares have you ever seen where the staff is all men? And aggressive men at that. Just think about it for 3 seconds.
None in my entire life. They're all ladies. Any guys are dads coming through.
Men can work at daycares but also we have no clue what those guys relationship to the business was.
Just think about it for 3 seconds.
No mate, YOU are going offtopic. I never said men CAN'T work daycares, I asked you "How many legit daycares have you ever seen where the staff is ALL-MEN?". This is the n'th time in this thread you misread what I say, to the point I can confidently say you're intentionally doing this in bad faith to derail the conversation, which is why this will be my last reply to you.
> also we have no clue what those guys relationship to the business was.
Except they also interviewed MN citizens who live in the area who also said they never saw any kids or women at that daycare with the misspelled "Learing" sign.
How many more points on the graph that form a line do you need to admit that it's an obvious scam?
>I suspect because you don't like a reasonable answer that doesn't fit your fraud narrative.
I just look at the evidence and use critical thinking to judge. You're the one not bringing any evidence to support your not-a-scam narrative and intentionally misreading my questions to give bad faith offtopic answers.
>Just think about it for 3 seconds.
Parroting someone is flattering but not a sign of good arguing skills.
It's annoying that we're talking about this in these terms, because the article is about public services fraud, and it's mostly technical, and it's an interesting subject. We shouldn't have to debate Tim Walz to engage with it.
FTA:
> 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. (I commend to you this research on Medicare fraud regarding dialysis transport. And yes, the team did some interesting work to distinguish fraudulent from legitimate usage of the program. Non-emergency transport for dialysis specifically had exploded in reimbursements—see Figure 1— not because American kidneys suddenly got worse but because fraudsters adversarially targeted an identified weakness in Medicare.)
Second: I think one of the points Patrick misses is that fraud did indisputably occur, but that doesn't mean we need to treat Shirley as a neutral observer who simply cares about fiscal responsibility. (If I'm wrong, I eagerly away his next video on red state fraud.)