Speaker unverified: observation

Transcript context

…It seems that fraud went up a lot. In net terms, maybe we need the time taxes and the other nonsense just to prevent what happens when we take them away. We tried that in 2020, 2021, it didn’t go that well. I do not think that time taxes, administrative burdens, having more of them, would have prevented the fraud at all. This was, in part, because we didn’t have these programs set up. There were two things that they were taking advantage of. A lot of it was criminal groups, criminal actors. One was the aid to small businesses. They were setting up sham small businesses and getting checks. That was legitimately a really big problem. Again, the book is about people, so I would separate that. I didn’t get into business regulation. This is entirely about individual citizens. Then in UI, this was really bad. This was a catastrophe. The problem is, even going into the pandemic, every single recession that we have, we have this conversation about how stupid it is that we have these ancient infrastructures, literally, programs running on COBOL, and that states don’t have the right incentive to upgrade service delivery and their digital systems. If you’re a governor and you have a low unemployment rate, what governor is going to devote a huge amount of money to upgrading a state UI system? Some states have gotten better systems since, but broadly, no. They’re just as bad. Then the next time the next recession comes, we’ll have the exact same conversation over again. I think that the government actually having more state capacity and more agile digital systems would help with fraud prevention. I do not think that putting more work on individuals is going to reduce the amount of fraud. Let me give you another example: Medicare. It’s a big chunk of the federal budget, right?…

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