This $9B figure is not a serious number; it’s a narrative. The concrete allegations released so far peg the criminal impact closer to $250 million which, let’s be honest, is bad enough.
As a Minnesotan, I’m appalled by the scale of these thefts, but glad they are actively investigating and charging these people for their crimes. If we had an honest and right minded political/justice system, we would be seeking to uncover and prosecute fraud through the nation.
It says right in the first para, "could be" $9B. They obviously have no real idea. It sounds like the audit turned up a large amount of spending that can't be positively accounted for. Similar to the multiple trillions missing in all recent DoD audits. We really don't know how much has truly been "stolen" versus just not being properly recorded.
I know so many honest citizens who could have benefitted from a tiny fraction of that money.
But it's been under investigation for 4.5 years as I understand, and the theoretical numbers thrown by politicians (hype/lies) are increasingly confusing. So what's the hope for any correction?
I don’t hear many people in Minnesota trying to pretend the existence of these crimes is a hoax, fake news, etc. - so the hope is that we take our prosecutorial responsibilities seriously. Perhaps, so seriously that we set an expectation for the investigation and criminal prosecution of fraud and corruption vertically as well.
To my understanding, the total spending is around $18B, so the allegation that 50% of all spending is fraudulent requires quite the sniff test. Additionally, large multi-billion dollar fraud causes are usually associated with large organizations (like a hospital or insurance system) which is not the case here.
Could it be $9B+? Stick enough vague qualifying words around your presentation of the probable truth then yea, sure - at least $9B in spending could be fraudulent.
It’s not 50% of all Medicaid spending. Minnesota spends about 18B a year (federal + state) on Medicaid). This is an alleged 9b of fraud over 7 years in specific services, so about a billion a year. An organization Minnesota knew was likely fraudulent at the time was still able to steal 250m in a year during COVID so a billion a year doesn’t seem too far fetched.
That would make it a more compelling argument, yes. However, the known ~$250M fraud was stolen over several years (rather than a single year’s take), so it’s not clear what could account for the remaining $8.75B.
“ The first archetype, Euro premiums, has an average labor cost of $2,232 per vehicle and includes premium brands such as Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Jaguar Land Rover, and Audi. This group is characterized by high production costs, complex design and advanced manufacturing processes, and strong labor unions.
Within the category, German manufacturers face among the highest labor costs of $3,307 due to stringent regulations and high wage rates.
The second archetype, electric vehicle-only manufacturers, includes startups as well as more established players like Tesla, which do not operate under organized labor contracts. Their average labor costs range from $1,502 to $13,291, and they face high per vehicle production costs due to low manufacturing volumes. EV-only manufacturers also have been heavily reliant on government subsidies, which are now being cut back by the new administration.
The third archetype, mainstream model manufacturers, has an average labor cost of $880 per vehicle and includes traditional high-volume automakers from various countries. Japanese manufacturers enjoy lower labor costs per vehicle, with an average of $769, compared with manufacturers in the United States, where the average is $1,341 — a labor cost per vehicle that reflects recent historic union gains.
The fourth archetype, Chinese car manufacturers, has an average labor cost of $585 per vehicle, characterized by low wages and high efficiency. The group maintains the lowest overall conversion costs in the industry by leveraging its newer factories, efficient supply chains, and high production volumes” - https://www.oliverwyman.com/our-expertise/insights/2025/apr/...
If you shovel the curb on your street “up stream” from the plowing direction, it provides a place for the plow stream to go and significantly reduces the amount of soon-to-be rock hard snow you’ll have to clear from your driveway.
“ The first archetype, Euro premiums, has an average labor cost of $2,232 per vehicle and includes premium brands such as Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Jaguar Land Rover, and Audi. This group is characterized by high production costs, complex design and advanced manufacturing processes, and strong labor unions. Within the category, German manufacturers face among the highest labor costs of $3,307 due to stringent regulations and high wage rates.
The second archetype, electric vehicle-only manufacturers, includes startups as well as more established players like Tesla, which do not operate under organized labor contracts. Their average labor costs range from $1,502 to $13,291, and they face high per vehicle production costs due to low manufacturing volumes. EV-only manufacturers also have been heavily reliant on government subsidies, which are now being cut back by the new administration.
The third archetype, mainstream model manufacturers, has an average labor cost of $880 per vehicle and includes traditional high-volume automakers from various countries. Japanese manufacturers enjoy lower labor costs per vehicle, with an average of $769, compared with manufacturers in the United States, where the average is $1,341 — a labor cost per vehicle that reflects recent historic union gains.
The fourth archetype, Chinese car manufacturers, has an average labor cost of $585 per vehicle, characterized by low wages and high efficiency. The group maintains the lowest overall conversion costs in the industry by leveraging its newer factories, efficient supply chains, and high production volumes” - https://www.oliverwyman.com/our-expertise/insights/2025/apr/...
honest q: what would it look like from your perspective if someone worked in entirely different tools and then only moved their finished work to google docs at the end?
In this case, the school was providing chromebooks so Google Docs were the default option. Using a different computer isn’t inherently a negative signal - but if we are already talking about plagiarism concerns, I’m going to start asking questions that are likely to reveal your understanding of the content. If your understanding falters, I’m going to ask you to prove your abilities in a different way/medium/etc.
In general, I don’t really understand educators hyperventilating about LLM use. If you can’t tell what your students are independently capable of and are merely asking them to spit back content at you, you’re not doing a good job.
> In general, I don’t really understand educators hyperventilating about LLM use. If you can’t tell what your students are independently capable of and are merely asking them to spit back content at you, you’re not doing a good job.
Alternatively, we have decades of credentials inflation such that our high school graduates can indeed do math - but we choose to pretend they can’t and instead insist that an expensive undergraduate degree is required for entry level work.
First, that's UCSD, not UC Davis. They mention UC Davis in the report, but the 8.5% refers to UCSD.
Secondly, mastering high school math is genuinely difficult these days. I'm a math major, I've made it through my calc courses and differential equations, but I found Algebra 2 legitimately hard. Logarithms and Trigonometric functions are counterintuitive, and not everybody is at their peak ability to buckle down and grind through things when they're struggling at age 17.
And lastly, this is pretty obviously at least in part a knock-on affect of covid, hence the extremely recent major spike. I'm not sure it's worth generalizing from "UC San Diego Students admitted in the last couple of years are struggling with high school math (because they were in high school during lockdown)" to "We shouldn't try paying mechanics more because everyone's bad at math"
While Math 2 was designed in 2016 to remediate missing high school math knowledge, now most students had knowledge gaps that went back much further, to middle and even elementary school. To address the large number of underprepared students, the Mathematics Department redesigned Math 2 for Fall 2024 to focus entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects (grades 1-8), and introduced a new course, Math 3B, so as to cover missing high-school common core math subjects (Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II or Math I, II, III; grades 9-11).
So actually I was wrong. I should have said:
- 11.8% of UCSD freshmen haven't mastered high school math
- 8.5% haven't mastered middle school math
These folks may have had some disruption during the last year of middle school, and the first year of high school. But does that fully explain why they haven't mastered middle school math or, in some cases, elementary school math?
The comment to which I responded quibbled with mhb saying "We used to be able to assume that high school and college graduates could do elementary school math."
It's clear from the report I linked that we cannot assume that high school graduates can do elementary school math.
> It's clear from the report I linked that we cannot assume that high school graduates can do elementary school math.
Well, I wouldn't necessarily assume that 100% of anyone with a degree has mastered what the degree is for. So to me the takeaway is that ~90% have mastered the math. And so in terms of the original comment, not necessarily do we need them all to go to undergraduate.
You'd better duck before the people who "don't test well" come for you. There are millions of people out there who swear they know a ton of things and have great skills in math/science/whatever, but when asked to demonstrate them in any verifiable way (a "test") they freeze up and perform poorly. I don't really think those people are all lying (it's probably an anxiety disorder) but the entire notion of being able to empirically measure knowledge/skills/aptitude is controversial to some people.
It doesn't matter if bad testers exist. Presumably, the percentage of them is not increasing over time, so the drift can still be measured. And if they are increasing over time, then the drift is still measuring something.
There sure seem to be more. Enough that some colleges have been bullied into eliminating the SAT or ACT requirements entirely, by those who allege they're unfair to that group. So those schools just admit based on the "homework grades" that are inflated by getting credit just for showing up and trying, success optional.
So IDK maybe there are more. Or maybe they are just louder now.
The suspension of SAT/ACT requirements was mostly a pandemic measure (and is being wound down) not something colleges were bullied into by people alleging unfairness (they are people alleging unfairness, they just aren't what got the policies implemented.)
> some colleges have been bullied into eliminating the SAT or ACT requirements entirely
"Starting in Fall 2026, a growing list of high-profile universities will once again require standardized test scores for admission, including most of the Ivy League, Stanford, and Georgetown to name a few" [1].
> Enough that some colleges have been bullied into eliminating the SAT or ACT requirements entirely, by those who allege they're unfair to that group. So those schools just admit based on the "homework grades" that are inflated by getting credit just for showing up and trying, success optional.
You drank the kool-aid. There was no bullying there. It was logistics.
In almost all cases, standardized test results were made optional. They were not “eliminated”.
Those who did not supply standardized test results, at least at any school that actually rejected people, had to provide a higher standard of proof of their abilities in their admissions materials.
I live in CA, and I know quite a few folks who glibly didn’t take or submit standardized test scores, and they absolutely did not get into schools that they were very academically qualified for (e.g., mid-tier UC schools like UCSD). These schools normally would have been safety schools for the given caliber of applicant.
Ivies made the SAT optional for a while, especially in 2020, but that was largely due to an access issue. I think they all require it now. And again, any person who didn’t have an SAT score and got admitted was almost certainly a strong admit anyway (super strong external academic validation, recruited athlete, etc.). I’m guessing precisely zero people sneaked into an Ivy by slyly not submitting a standardized test score while also being a marginal applicant.
A ton of high school graduates can't do basic math (which also explains their economic illiteracy, like believing that just taxing billionaires more would fix everything[1]).
And also at the same time, we demand college degrees for white-collar jobs that anyone who completed the alleged requirements to graduate high school could totally do. I think this stems from an outdated belief that college is difficult and challenging, and therefore getting through it proves you're exceptionally clever. A notion that has been a joke for at least 15 years if not 20.
So everything is fake. The diplomas are fake, the degrees are fake, and the job requirements are fake. All of it is being used to come up with legal and justifiable ways to pick the people with sufficient brain cells to be entrusted with job responsibilities.
[1] Most college graduates would likely get this question orders of magnitude wrong: If you could split the full net worth of the top 10 billionaires equally among every man, woman, and child in America how big would each one's check be? Correct answer: Just over $6,000. (Of course, we'll ignore how to deal with the market crash caused by forcing the sudden liquidation of their 2 trillion dollars in assets.)
Does going to college and learning say, compilers or differential equations not have value? Your employer won't teach you. Please don't tell me the heat equation is fake.
I think they're saying that learning compilers, differential equations, or the heat equation aren't actually that relevant for getting a mid-level procurement job or becoming the manager of a hotel.
Imagine trying to advance that the proposition of taxing billionaires is negatable on basic math. That's a critical thinking error, probably compounded by a lack of education in humanities and civilization not a basic math problem.
Tax them, don't tax them, I don't care. But you can't argue with the math that a one-time $6k or even $12k per person will not pay for the welfare state the DNC keeps promising us. Please, prove me wrong, show me the math of how you're going to take the billionaires' money (even discounting the fact it'll destroy every retirement account when that market shock happens) and pay for free college for all, double pay for teachers, triple the minimum wage, give free houses to everyone who can't afford them now.
The point isn't whether they should pay a higher tax rate (probably they should!) -- it's whether it would be massively transformative to our society if/when we enacted that. I argue it is not. Pretending it is, is the Marxist fringe's version of the welfare queen or the illegal immigrant murderer that the right-wing people try to bamboozle their base with. We could eliminate all welfare fraud and all immigrant criminals by magic and it wouldn't make our society wildly better. It would be a small improvement.
taxing billionaires isn't just about redistributing their money. it's about changing the objective functions that motivate the ultrawealthy.
when they see diminishing returns for increasing their net worth, they might think "hey, maybe instead of using my immense resources to further enrich myself i should do... anything else"
All right, but since I’ve pointed out that it won’t solve any of the main structural issues in our economy to even fully eliminate the billionaire class, what’s the purpose to society of coercing them to stop acquiring money? Just envy?
Well most of the people you're strawmanning also support raising corporate taxes, and generally also on millionaires. I get that the imaginary blue haired nonbinary public school grad in your head exclusively uses the word "billionaire," though.
> discounting the fact it'll destroy every retirement account when that market shock happens
You're correct on the fact that taxing billionaires doesn't generate meaningful revenue. You're wrong that it would prompt a stock-market crash.
If one raised top tax rates in a revenue-neutral way, one would expect it to massively boost the economy and thus the stock market. You'd have unlocked more money for high-velocity spenders.
> You're wrong that it would prompt a stock-market crash.
It certainly would.
Where do you think those billionaires would get the money to pay the tax? It’s not like they have billions of dollars in cash somewhere; they’d sell assets. Those assets are predominately stock. Selling off that much stock at once would absolutely disrupt the markets.
> Selling off that much stock at once would absolutely disrupt the markets
...don't do this.
The combined net worth of America's billionaires is about $7tn. Let's assume half of that is in public stocks. That's $3.5tn. That's about what retail investors alone bought "in the first six months of 2025" [1].
Given the fundamentals of the companies wouldn't have changed, this would be a massive opportunity for institutional investors to deploy capital. (If you didn't do the tax in a revenue-neutral manner, you'd free up tonnes of capital from Treasury demand.)
One might expect a dip in companies where a single billionaire holds a large fraction of the float, e.g. Tesla, Amazon, et cetera. But broadly speaking, these aren't numbers which–even if compressed to a single year, which isn't how you'd pass such legislation–would cause a crash.
There are good arguments against super taxes. Crashing the stock market isn't one of them.
Well most talk of taxing billionaires involves capital gains taxes, not one time wealth taxes, and the serious lefties care more about nationalizing their assets than taxing them.
But yeah, the imaginary tax proposals invented in this thread may or may not work out, i wouldn't call anything about them "certain" though
100K per family by my math. Don't know why you believe that only the top 10 billionaires have too much personal wealth.
Why does society need to create a increasingly out of touch class of people that think they are morally justified in telling people how to live their lives. The simple fact is that if the government didn't give these people billions in subsidies we would never have to hear them bloviate, Musk, Farely, all these rich A-Holes keeping America stuck in the local minima of car ownership would be utterly irrelevant.
> Why does society need to create an increasingly out of touch class of people that think they are morally justified in telling people how to live their lives.
Is that a… libertarian argument for wealth confiscation?
Why does government need to take a bunch of people’s money for no reason other than “because I’m mad you have more money than me”? Or I suppose the motivation you described is actually that we don’t like how influential successful people are. So, should everyone whose opinion we don’t like be treated this way?
There are rich and poor in every society and always have been - it’s not a government failing to have income inequality. In extreme socialist regimes, the government officials themselves are always the ultra-wealthy - because they make the rules on who gets to keep their money and their choice is “Me.”
reply