"Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes..."

"... by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided.... Outrage has swelled among Minnesotans.... Gov. Tim Walz and fellow Democrats are being asked to explain how so much money was stolen on their watch.... Many Somali Americans in Minnesota say the fraud has damaged the reputation of their entire community, around 80,000 people, at a moment when their political and economic standing was on the rise.... Critics of the Walz administration say that the fraud persisted partly because state officials were fearful of alienating the Somali community in Minnesota.... The episode has raised broader questions for some residents about the sustainability of Minnesota’s Scandinavian-modeled system of robust safety net programs bankrolled by high taxes...."

I'm reading "How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch/Prosecutors say members of the Somali diaspora, a group with growing political power, were largely responsible. President Trump has drawn national attention to the scandal amid his crackdown on immigration" (NYT).

"It’s really hard to say that you would have a child if given X amount of money from the government, because I think that’s just not the calculus. It is a very intimate, personal decision that people make."

Said Christina Gibson-Davis, a sociology and public policy professor at Duke University, quoted in "Raising kids is too expensive, most Americans say in new survey/Seven in 10 respondents said raising children is too expensive, a notable jump from 2024, according to an annual public opinion survey on U.S. family life" (WaPo).

"Six Takeaways From the Senate Deal to End the Shutdown."

Headline at the NYT. Free-access link: here. The 6 things (paraphrased unless in quotes):

1. Democrats lost their unity.

2. The health care matter was left out.

3. "Trump’s pressure tactics worked.... The group of people affected by the shutdown grew with each week" — from the thousands of federal workers going without pay to the millions who expected food-buying assistance and the millions who were hoping to travel by plane.

4. Trump did not participate in talks with Democratic Party leaders. He was, conspicuously, at an NFL game when the deal coalesced last night.

5. Republican leaders Mike Johnson and John Thune also withheld participation.

6. Democrats at least have "some concessions in their fight against the Trump administration’s concerted effort to reconfigure and diminish the federal government." That's not about health care. It's about rehiring those who were laid off during the shutdown and barring further layoffs until January 30th.

ADDED: Will Trump gloat? Should he? He hasn't put anything up on Truth Social since his display — 13 hours ago — of Air Force One flying over the football stadium. And at X, 9 hours ago:

 

The most EPIC flyover of the season 🇺🇸🦅 pic.twitter.com/WYJtg7AHcW

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) November 10, 2025

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson empowers Trump to continue withholding food money.

The NYT reports: "Supreme Court Temporarily Allows Trump to Curtail Food Stamp Funding/The temporary ruling by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, blocking a lower court order to fully fund the aid, added to the uncertainty around the nation’s largest anti-hunger program."

See? It's not all about empathy.

Justice Jackson, a member of the court’s three-justice liberal bloc who has spoken forcefully against many of the Trump administration’s policies, issued a decision on the stay because she is responsible for emergency applications from that region of the country. She said in the order that she expected the appeals court to evaluate the matter and issue a more complete ruling swiftly.

Still, many Democrats around the country erupted in anger on Friday night, with some accusing President Trump of trying to turn nutrition assistance — a program on which one in eight Americans rely — into a bargaining chip while the government remains closed.

“Trump fought for this,” Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, a Democrat, said in a post on social media. “He doesn’t care if millions of Americans go hungry.”

Did Hochul say that before or after Jackson showed she "doesn't care"?

"I’m not going to be distracted by, ‘Oh, does the guy have a big f–king hammer!?’ What about those babies!?"

"This guy wants to create a ballroom for his rich friends while completely turning a blind eye to the fact that babies are going to starve when the SNAP benefits end in just hours from now. Come on."

Said Kamala Harris, quoted in "Kamala Harris loses it, goes on expletive-laden rant about Trump’s donation-funded ballroom" (NY Post).

Eh. I don't believe she "lost it." She just delivered a mundane talking point. She got the memo: It's bad for Trump to spend a lot of money, even donated money, on the ballroom when the shutdown is about to dry up SNAP payments. 

I don't think peppering your speech with "fucking" means anything anymore... although... what about the babies?!! 

By the way, what percentage of those fed by SNAP are babies? I looked it up and got the answer 4.4%. Children of all ages make up 38.9%.

"Lee Anderson, Reform’s chief whip, suggested the return of the 'Invacar' — or invalid carriage — a small single-seater microcar that was distributed by the NHS for decades..."

"... after the Second World War. Anderson told a press conference hosted by the party: 'I remember back in the day if you were on disability and you wanted a car from the state, it was a blue three-wheeler, anybody remember those? What’s wrong with that? Let’s go back to that.' The cars were banned from British roads in 2003 for being too dangerous, after reports of them overturning and catching fire, and ministers ordered that all remaining cars be crushed. Anderson made the comments as he criticised the Motability scheme, which allows disabled people to get cars through the benefits system. Labour ministers are considering removing BMWs, Mercedes and other luxury cars from the scheme, which provides such premium brands to more than 40,000 benefits claimants...."

From "Bring back three-wheeled cars for disabled drivers, Reform urges/The chief whip, Lee Anderson, suggests return of ‘Invacars’, which were withdrawn on safety grounds, as part of a replacement of the Motability scheme" (London Times).

"Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)."

"Bottom line, the well has run dry. At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01. We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats. They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance."

So it says at the official USDA website, quoted in "USDA blames Democrats for potential SNAP benefits lapse in new message: 'The well has run dry'/The federal agency's website features a banner that says no benefits will be issued on Nov. 1" (NBC News).

Gender mutilation procedures! The Democrats say that what they are fighting for is to keep health insurance premiums from doubling. It's a shame the issues are so confusing. We're talking about millions of ordinary people — 43 million — facing loss of food stamps. That's so much raw anxiety. So elemental. How are they supposed to begin to think about complicated politics? By getting upset about transgender people and immigrants taking their money?!

"Every one of these jurisdictions [that permit physician-assisted suicide] has a total fertility rate below the replacement threshold."

"I do not think this is a coincidence. About 30 years ago, P.D. James’s prescient novel 'The Children of Men' imagined that a birthrate crisis would induce governments to facilitate the suicides of the elderly in a ritual known as 'the Quietus.'... The population pyramid is increasingly inverted.... This poses an existential threat to welfare systems, which rely on young workers to fund entitlements and health care for older adults. Those who hope that liberal immigration policies will solve this problem forget that immigrants themselves get old, and their birthrates tend to converge with those of the greater population over time. If birthrates do not recover — and at present, they show no real signs of doing so — eventually we will be forced to revert to the system that prevailed for all of human history up until recently: Older people will be cared for privately, typically by their children and grandchildren, and those without families will have to rely on charities, such as they are. In the meantime, we are in a period of transition. Welfare states limp on, but in conditions of increasing stress...."

Writes Louise Perry, in "The Perverse Economics of Assisted Suicide" (NYT).

"Academics are unsure if removing soda from SNAP would improve public health."

"Data is scarce: No state has piloted a change, and researchers can’t remove people’s benefits for a study because of the arbitrary harm it might cause. Lisa Harnack, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health, found a way to test the concept by finding people who were eligible for SNAP but not enrolled. She created a 'SNAP-like program' that gave some people normal SNAP benefits and gave others similar benefits but excluded soda (participants could still buy whatever other food they wanted with their own money). Her first study found lower calorie intake and improved nutrition among the people who couldn’t purchase soda with their benefits, but her follow-up study did not.... [Another] study found it would probably reduce rates of obesity — but even so, [the researcher said]... 'If you try to solve this problem using SNAP as a lever, so only SNAP people are impacted by it, what we’re likely to do is just increase stigma for people who are trying to make ends meet.'"

From "Should Food Stamps Pay for Soda? Colorado and Texas are among the states aiming to change what food and drink can be bought with SNAP benefits" (NYT).

"The welfare society is fundamentally a community, which is based on a mutual trust that we all contribute. All that is being seriously challenged by parallel societies."

Said Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, quoted in "Denmark Aims a Wrecking Ball at ‘Non-Western’ Neighborhoods/A government program is using demolition and relocation to remake neighborhoods with immigrants, poverty or crime" (NYT). 

The term "parallel societies" refers to "segregated enclaves where immigrants do not participate in the wider society or learn Danish, even as they benefit from the country’s generous welfare system."  

The government is getting rid of more than 4,000 public housing units.

"A self-described high school dropout living in a camper with a tarp on the roof sings a plaintive cri de coeur about blue collar workers being shafted by the wealthy..."

"... and it is right-wing Republicans who rush to embrace him while Democrats wag their fingers and scold him for insensitivity. Huh?"

Writes Nicholas Kristof — who can't really be surprised, can he? — in "On Their High Horse, Too Many Liberals Disdain Oliver Anthony" (NYT).

Have Democrats retreated so far from their workingman roots that their knee-jerk impulse is to dump on a blue collar guy who highlights “folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat”?...

Easily, for anyone who's been watching America in this century, the answer is yes. The "workingman"/"blue collar guy" might be a racist, and if anything in that song feels like dog-whistle racism, that brings on the hostility of the left. The lyric "the obese milkin' welfare" closed liberal hearts to the plaint of the working-class white man. They're not "on their high horse" in this. They're sticking with their anti-racist values and keeping their sensitivities tuned. 

Kristof says:

"If their mom were too sick to make meals or wash or do anything at all, would they just leave her there?"

"Of course not. Instead, they meant that they couldn’t see where neediness fit into their lives, because their lives were arranged to pretend that care didn’t exist. For them — perhaps for you, too, if sickness hasn’t yet rearranged your life — care was something that happened to other people."

Writes Emily Kenway in "Family caregiving should be seen as an expectation — not an exception" (WaPo).

Where this column goes: "Ultimately, caring for loved ones should be a fundamental, protected right...."

Currently, family medical leave is unpaid and so restrictive that, according to the Labor Department, 44 percent of U.S. employees are ineligible. Instead, we could follow Norway’s example, expanding leave to all workers and sharing the costs between employers and government. If you need a business case, consider the recent Harvard Business School finding that providing caregiver leave can reduce turnover, especially of senior-level employees.

"Ms. Thomas and her husband were foster parents for their two grandsons for nearly a year and a half...."

"The expense reimbursements, day care support and a $200-per-year stipend for each child had been a big help, but the imposing child welfare requirements — including monthly visits from social workers — made Ms. Thomas want to live with her grandsons like a normal family. In April she and her husband took guardianship of the boys, which relieved them of the foster care requirements, but the decision came at a cost: They lost the expense reimbursements and the day care support.... $2,700 per month in day care costs [is] more than her $2,300 monthly income...."

From the end of the NYT article "Can ‘Kinship Care’ Help the Child Welfare System? The White House Wants to Try/The Biden administration proposes spending $20 billion over a decade to help some of the most vulnerable families in the country, including relatives suddenly thrust into child rearing."

So the "child welfare requirements — including monthly visits from social worker" are so onerous, that the grandparents preferred to pay the expenses themselves and have the freedom and privacy given to guardians. How is the Biden administration going to help people in their position? I would think retired grandparents like the Thomases are less in need of reimbursement of day care costs than many parents who are taking care of their own children. 

This is a stick-up.

I'm reading "Like Marie Antoinette," a book review written by Mario Puzo in 1968 and published in the NYT. The book under review is "The Jeweler’s Eye," by William F. Buckley Jr. 

There are a lot of things I want to blog about this morning, so why am back in 1968? It's because of the first thing I wrote about this morning, the NYT obituary for Kathy Boudin. I was struck by the sentence, "During the stickup, the gunmen killed a security guard, Peter Paige." Stickup? That strikes me as gangster slang, lacking the formality I would expect from the NYT in the account of this event that took place 4 decades ago.

Does the NYT generally use "stickup" to describe serious matters? I searched its archive, and the Mario Puzo article caught my attention:

"But there is much in the Democrats’ [$3.5 trillion] outline that makes less sense. They want to make community college free for everyone, even wealthy students."

Writes the Washington Post Editorial Board in "Opinion: Democrats should seize this chance to reshape the safety net. But not all they propose makes sense."

As many of the commenters over there are pointing out, wealthy people don't send their kids to community college. A test of who's wealthy could just be who wouldn't send their kids to community college even if it were free. So you don't have to worry about including the wealthy. What you should worry about is channeling un-wealthy people into community college. Who should go to community college? 

Shouldn't the answer be something other than those who need/want to spend less money? Here's a U.S. News article from 2019, "10 Reasons to Attend a Community College." There are reasons other than money. It might be a good choice for those who were not very good high school students and need to "ease into" a college experience. It might be good for older students with a family or a job that they need to balance with schoolwork. And it might be good if you want to go into a specialized career where there's a 2-year certificate program. 

"When the French government launched a smartphone app that gives 300 euros to every 18-year-old in the country for cultural purchases like books and music, or exhibition and performance tickets..."

"... most young people’s impulse wasn’t to buy Proust’s greatest works or to line up and see Molière. Instead, France’s teenagers flocked to manga.... As of this month, books represented over 75 percent of all purchases made through the app since it was introduced nationwide in May — and roughly two-thirds of those books were manga, according to the organization that runs the app, called the Culture Pass.... But the focus on comic books reveals a subtle tension at the heart of the Culture Pass’s design, between the almost total freedom it affords it young users — including to buy the mass media they already love — and its architects’ aim of guiding users toward lesser-known and more highbrow arts."

From "France Gave Teenagers $350 for Culture. They’re Buying Comic Books/Young people can buy books, tickets and classes via a government smartphone app. But rather than discovering highbrow arts, many are choosing mass media they already love" (NYT).

I wonder why I keep getting a busy signal from the Wisconsin Department of Revenue.

I'll bet I'm not the only person who got a letter on Saturday from the Wisconsin Department of Revenue that said:

Wisconsin Tomorrow Small Business Grant — Application Denied

Important: If you did not recently file a Wisconsin Tomorrow Small Business Recovery Grant Application with the Wisconsin Department of Revenue, call us immediately at (608) 266-2772....

I hate the feeling of rejection, but it's annoying to get rejected when you didn't even apply... and then be agitated by the announcement that it's important to call the Department of Revenue "immediately," then to learn that you can't call on Saturday, to wait until Monday, and then to have the line endlessly busy.

But beyond this annoyance is my suspicion that the Department of Revenue considered every taxpayer with "small business" income as if they'd applied. If that's what they did, I don't like being treated as if I'd applied. And I really don't like having to worry that someone could be using my name to apply for a grant.

Here's a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel from last May: "State to give 84,000 Wisconsin businesses $5,000 grants by end of June."

Gov. Tony Evers authorized $420 million, through funding received by the American Rescue Plan Act, to be distributed to businesses that apply by 4:30 p.m. on June 7.

Maybe they didn't get enough applications, and they needed to imagine them. If so, I'd like to know who got the money without applying. Not that I think my little business here deserves a $5,000 "rescue" grant. I just want to think that the Department of Revenue is a fair and orderly place, and I don't like being agitated by a weird letter and told to "immediately" call a number that is always busy. I can handle it well enough, but I doubt that I'm the only one who got this rejection letter.

UPDATE, Tuesday 1:50 p.m. — I finally got through and, after waiting on hold, was told the letter means that someone filed a fraudulent application using my name and that this has happened to thousands of people in Wisconsin. The application was denied, so there's nothing to do other than to know what I already know, which is that my information is out there to be used. 

The mayor of {city name} is tweeting.

Thanks to the American Rescue Plan, most families in {city name} will receive monthly#ChildTaxCredit payments. It’s a guaranteed income through December. I joined@mayorsforagi because all Americans deserve an income floor. This is a step in that direction.

— Mayor of Madison (@MayorOfMadison) July 17, 2021

 

That's been up for 17 hours, and it's been mocked on Reddit (at the Madison subreddit) for the last 8 hours. A screenshot is preserved at Reddit, and I'll just put it below the jump for safe-keeping, on the theory that the tweet will be deleted and replaced.

Somebody at Reddit — in a post rated minus 2 — defends the Mayor:

I’m pretty sure it’s intentional, the point being every city is benefiting from the credit so you can insert any city’s name. But I do think it’s funny how the people who misunderstand the posting are playing this “gotcha” game like they’re just sooo much smarter than the Mayor! LOL

By the way, I loathe the overuse of "smart" in political discussions. It's not about IQ or education. It's about paying attention.

"To be sure, we don’t have access to the counterfactual world in which capital-gains tax rates sat at 40 percent over the past four decades."

"It is theoretically possible that growth would have been lower under such a scenario. But even in the most generous assessment, the impact of low capital-gains tax rates on economic growth is unclear. What’s more, the actual policy being debated here is not what the capital-gains tax rate should be, but rather, whether it is worthwhile to raise the capital-gains rate in order to invest in universal prekindergarten, public child care, a child allowance, free community college, and paid family and medical leave." 

From "Rich Investors Make a Poor Case Against Biden’s Tax Plan" (NY Magazine). 

There was some concern expressed yesterday over the "remarkable slackening" in population growth seen in the 2020 census. What will it do to the economy going forward if Americans don't maintain the long human tradition of robust reproduction? I was inclined to say, don't worry about it, less population growth is good for the environment. 

But if you took the other side of that debate — and plenty of readers emailed to instruct me on the need for newly bred Americans to maintain our economic well-being — you'd better worry about women declining the option to undertake childbearing and men and women passing on the potentially fulfilling endeavor of child-rearing. It's terribly expensive! But people are supposed to plunge into it as part of the love-struck romance of youth. Damn the financial incentives. But, oh!, rich folk need plenty of incentives to keep investing. 

Sorry, rich folk coddlers, you're going to have to incentivize reproduction a little bit. The old scheme of locking women into childbirth as a consequence of indulging in sex failed long ago, and you sound like a fool talking about it now, especially if you attempt to stand on the foundation of love for babies, when what you are doing is justifying freeing rich folk — people who make over $1 million a year — from paying a 40% capital gains tax. Can't dishearten them in their enthusiasm for investing? What about the young people who are disheartened about having children? Worry about them.

(To comment, you can email me here.)

"An unlikely coalition of Democrats across the ideological spectrum mounted an 11th-hour push in the final weekend before the American Rescue Plan for President Biden to go big on tackling child poverty."

"They prevailed over what one person involved in the process called the 'cost police' in Biden’s inner circle, those anxiously warning about the ballooning cost of the stimulus package.... This under-the-radar success created what could be the most consequential piece of the $1.9 trillion package — one that, if made permanent, could approach the impact of the programs established under President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. The sudden, unexpected creation of an approximately $120 billion social program has thrown a twist into the political landscape.... With the initiative expiring in a year, all but ensuring it will be a major issue in the midterms, the child poverty measure raises a central question: Are the politics of big government back?... A family with two young children and no income will now get $600 a month. The parents of 90 percent of the country’s children will benefit, and 27 million children will be lifted from poverty, according to analysts.... ...Democrats hope American families will get used to receiving their checks, and they cite the Washington axiom that it’s hard to take something away from voters after they’ve started receiving it. Still, popularizing the program will require Biden to begin selling it..... Some Democrats acknowledge that some in their party are squeamish about having to defend the distribution of government checks to working-age adults who are not working....  "

From "How Biden quietly created a huge social program" (WaPo).