alt Hacker NewsWhen a significant share of the taxes you pay are mishandled or lost to fraud, yes it is a punishment.
That's been happening for a long time in the US. Staggering military industrial complex. Tens of billions lost in COVID relief. Billions lost in Minnesota due to unchecked privatized social welfare fraud (which has been known about for a decade).
Some mistakes will happen. What we have is unacceptable. If the government can't handle the money responsibly, it has no business collecting the money.
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Do you have any sources for either or both of "billions" and "known about for a decade" that aren't a figurehead of the current US administration? Because this all smells a lot like "the immigrants are catching and eating cats and geese" story which also turned out to be a lie.
Minnesota is only a drop in the ocean compared to Florida and other states. One of the current FL senators was CEO of one of the companies convicted of a much larger fraud.
That's more an indictment of the way you (the US) starve your public services of proper regulatory power with the right level of personnel to handle it.
But your Congress voted last year to defund the IRS and the administration are busy gutting the SEC and other regulators.
Oh and government fraud has nothing on the commercial and rent-seeker frauds extracting wealth for no benefit from their positions of control. But anti-trust prosecutions are basically a dead path for rectification.
Blaming the "government" for what happens from obvious policy failures is the fault of the policies and those that set them, not the "government" as some nameless bureaucracy.