Fraud by Design
Entitlement fraud is not merely a budgetary issue. It is a test of whether policymakers are willing to align incentives with reality….
American Thinker
One of the most persistent illusions in modern politics is that good intentions are a substitute for sound incentives. Nowhere is this illusion more costly than in America’s vast entitlement programs. Each year, hundreds of billions of dollars are distributed through programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, disability insurance, food assistance, housing subsidies, and pandemic-era relief funds. And each year, tens of billions — by even conservative official estimates — are lost to fraud, improper payments, and abuse.
The question is not whether fraud exists. It plainly does. The more serious question is why it persists at such scale — and why the scale of fraud so often approaches the scale of opportunity itself.
Fraud is not merely the result of individual moral failure. It is, more fundamentally, the predictable outcome of incentives embedded within the structure of entitlement systems. Whenever large sums of money are distributed based on eligibility criteria that are difficult to verify, fraud becomes not an aberration but an expectation.
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