Category Archives: California

Gavin Newsom Allows Many $Billions in Welfare Fraud

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If Gavin Newsom really wanted to cut down on waste in California, instead of flushing $20 million down a consulting firm, he would stop allowing massive welfare fraud.

From City Journal:

From unemployment insurance and Medicaid to failed homeless initiatives and welfare programs, seemingly every state program has been compromised by criminals. The best estimates suggest that, on the governor’s watch, fraudsters, scammers, and organized crime rings have stolen at least $180 billion from taxpayers.

The fraud has been out of control since barely a year after Newsom took office, when California’s tyrannical overreaction to Covid shut down the economy, throwing millions out of work while Newsom dined with his fellow rich moonbats at the French Laundry.

In response to the crisis, Newsom sought to dump pallets of cash across the state—as quickly as possible.

It was dumped largely into the pockets of fraudsters.

Not only did the state have some of the most generous welfare programs in the country; its bureaucrats had also failed to implement some basic fraud controls during Newsom’s tenure.

Scammers have been robbing California taxpayers from as far away as Romania. Others do it from Tennessee:

Around September 2020, Fontrell Antonio Baines, a rapper from Memphis known as Nuke Bizzle, released a music video on YouTube entitled “EDD.” In the song, Baines bragged about ripping off California’s UI [unemployment insurance] program. “Go to the bank with a stack of these,” Baines rapped, holding up EDD envelopes. Another rapper can be heard saying: “You gotta sell cocaine, I just file a claim.” All told, Baines obtained more than $700,000 in stolen funds using preloaded EDD debit cards.

Democrats know how to take care of their base.

California’s prison population apparently got in on the action, too: the EDD allegedly paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent claims in prisoners’ names, including those of at least 133 inmates on death row.

Covid was a looting spree:

State officials eventually admitted to having paid out approximately $20 billion in fraudulent claims during the pandemic, and to making an estimated $55 billion in improper payments.

Actual numbers are of course higher. According to fraud expert Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions for Government,

“In California, at one point, you had more people applying for unemployment insurance benefits than you had people over the age of 18.”

The looting did not stop after Covid hysteria ran out of gas. Just considering the California implementation of Medicaid,

California’s attorney general has conceded that “Medi-Cal fraud could reach billions of dollars annually.”

That is to say, many billions.

Based on state experts’ best guesses of annual Medi-Cal expenditures and applying a conservative, 15 percent fraud rate to each fiscal year since 2019, Medi-Cal has lost some $146 billion in taxpayer funds to fraud on Gavin Newsom’s watch.

The fraud is too massive to ignore indefinitely. Democrats have been forced to respond — by making fraud even easier:

State Senator Lola Smallwood-Cuevas sponsored a bill that would raise the threshold for felony welfare fraud from $950 to $25,000. The measure would also make it more difficult to charge perjury based on misstatements to county welfare departments. Republican State Assemblyman Carl DeMaio has said that if the bill becomes law, it will effectively “legalize welfare fraud” in California.

Thanks to Trump being in office, the Feds are stepping in.

Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, announced the creation of a federal task force to combat fraud and corruption in the state’s homelessness programs. The task force has already brought charges in several multimillion-dollar homelessness-fraud cases—and Essayli has vowed that more are coming. “California has spent $24 billion in the last five years on homelessness, and no one can account for where that money has really gone,” Essayli said in January. Gavin Newsom, he added, is the “king of fraud.”

With fraud on this scale, it is no wonder California is crumbling and cannot pay its bills. But at least Democrats are innovative when it comes to finding new ways to confiscate other people’s money so they can waste it. For example, a San Francisco homeowner was fined $50,000 for trimming trees that required it:

On tips from abcanc and Wiggins.

Gavin Newsom Wastes Money to Save Money

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DOGE was such a great idea that even California’s moonbat governor Gavin Newsom is trying to imitate it. As usual, Newsom is failing.

The New York Post reports:

Newsom — who signed an executive order to cut spending in the state, à la Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is hitting roadblocks with the plan amid a multibillion-dollar state budget deficit.

The erstwhile Golden State handed Boston Consulting Group as much as $20 million to help it trim $2 billion in spending — a seemingly easy task amid the blizzard of waste that characterizes California under Democrat rule.

But the group — which hired former Newsom cabinet Secretary and Department of Finance Director Ana J. Matosantos — is now expected to only find $810 million in savings, according to legislative analysts.

That number may even go down later in May, analysts added, as indicated by the Newsom administration.

Regarding cuts that actually get made, expect the savings to go down to zero — or rather, to negative $20 million, after the firm has been paid.

On a tip from patthedog.

Open Thread

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Delusional moonbat Jennifer Siebel Newsom would be First Lady under President Gavin Newsom. On tips from Wiggins and Anonymous.

Democrat Quid Pro Vote

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Given what he has done to California, who the hell would vote to put Gavin Newsom in a position to do the same thing to the whole country? This guy would:

Democrats enable criminals and scumbags and help to grow their numbers. In return, they acquire loyal support on election day. You’ve heard of quid pro quo. This is quid pro vote.

On a tip from patthedog.

California Gubernatorial Debate Canceled for Not Being Sufficiently Diverse

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If there are not enough DEI candidates, then there cannot be a debate.

Via USA Today:

USC has canceled a planned California governor’s debate after days of backlash over claims that the event’s invitation criteria excluded candidates of color…

The debate, scheduled for Tuesday, March 24, was to be hosted by ABC7/KABC-TV Los Angeles and the USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future. It was called off less than 24 hours before airtime after USC said it could not reach an agreement with KABC to expand the number of participating candidates.

Former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra — who pushed for kidney transplants to be provided on a racial basis — plays the race card once again:

Becerra, a Democratic candidate for governor, accused USC of using an “arbitrary formula that favors wealthy candidates” and said the criteria resulted in the exclusion of all candidates of color from the debate.

Objective standards will sometimes have that effect. This is why Democrats tend to oppose merit in favor of contrived diversity.

USC previously said invitations were based on a candidate viability formula developed by USC Professor Christian Grose and the USC Democracy and Fair Elections Lab, using polling and fundraising thresholds as key variables.

Racists! Participation should be based on membership in favored I mean marginalized identity groups.

On a tip from Franco.

Rap Taught in Public Schools

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If Democrat-dominated public schools no longer teach children to read, write, and do math, it could be that educators have different goals.

The New York Post reports from California:

The Merced City School District in the Central Valley — one of the state’s lower-performing school districts based on test performances — has signed a $270,000 agreement with Fresno-based School Yard Rap, which describes its approach to learning as “edutainment.”

School Yard Rap founder Brandon Brown boasts that his edutainment “helps eradicate a lot of hate and ignorance in the country.” It does this with lyrics instructing kids that “History books have a white male skew.”

The contracts include a summer “Rap Camp” and an “African American Affinity Group,” which is only for 100 African American students, raising questions about whether the program complies with federal law. …

“It is illegal for the government to offer benefits solely on the basis of race,” Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said.

Never mind what’s illegal. The important thing is to affirm and promote the preferred culture. Refraining from teaching the three R’s will help achieve this objective.

Only about 13% of students meet math-proficiency benchmarks…

This is not a bug but a feature, when you are trying to grow an underclass dependent on welfare and therefore beholden to the Democratic Party.

On a tip from R F.

California Wastes Big on Bridge to Nowhere

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The homelessness grift and the bullet train to nowhere are hardly the only means California Democrats have had of flushing taxpayer money into oblivion. The New York Post reports on a bridge to nowhere:

In 2022, California Gov. Gavin Newsom broke ground on the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing (WAWC), a project featuring an overpass for animals atop ten lanes of the 101 Freeway in Southern California.

At the ceremony, Newsom boasted that the state had committed $54 million. He promised to “complete the job within another $10 million,” before seeming to hedge on whether that final sum would do the trick.

By now we know what this means: $64 million was only the beginning. The project, which was supposed to be finished last year, is currently $21 million over budget.

WAWC leader Beth Pratt tells taxpayers to keep bending over:

“There’s no boondoggle,” she said. “Given the times we’re living in,” a potential $21 million overage is “not that bad.”

The times we are living in are characterized by arrogant looting inflicted by pathologically greedy liberals.

Within days of Pratt’s announcement, the California Transportation Commission funneled another $18.8 million to the project, well exceeding the governor’s $10 million cap. The project’s total price tag now reaches about $114 million, reportedly including some $77 million in state funds.

Helping animals across the road is only a pretext. The bridge is a jobs program for useless enviromoonbats.

As the WAWC-endorsing Wildlife Crossing Fund notes, citing the California Department of Transportation’s estimate, “for every $1 billion spent” on wildlife crossings, “13,000 jobs are created.”

Presumably at least a few of those 13,000 would be engaged in some productive activity if Democrats did not pay them to drag out boondoggles — of which there will be many more if Dems remain in power:

At the groundbreaking ceremony, Newsom envisioned WAWC as a catalyst for the construction of wildlife crossings across the state. California, he boasted, set aside $105 million “to replicate projects like this all up and down the state.” Pratt reportedly thinks “hundreds more crossings are needed.”

You can see why Newsom has presidential ambitions. California’s deficit has been estimated to reach as high as $35 billion in coming years. As Margaret Thatcher famously observed, moonbats eventually run out of other people’s money. But if he achieves power at the federal level, he can just print more.

On tips from R F and abcanc.

California’s Fraudulent Lifeline to the Dead

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No wonder the dead are such a loyal Democrat constituency, considering how much of other people’s money they are given in deep blue California.

Via Breitbart:

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr discussed fraud in the federal Lifeline subsidy program during a Breitbart News policy discussion Tuesday, citing a report from the FCC’s inspector general that found more than 94,000 dead people signed up for benefits in California. …

“The Lifeline program is a federal program that you pay for,” Carr explained. “It is effectively an assessment that appears on your monthly telephone bill. We collect that money, and it goes to do a lot of things, but one of the things it does is to provide subsidies for phone or internet service for low income households.”

Carr says California has been responsible for “vetting to see who’s eligible for Lifeline.” Consequently, the program has degenerated into a looting spree in Gavin Newsom’s Land of Fruits and Nuts, which is as likely to prevent welfare fraud as Tim Walz’s Minnesota.

Good news from Carr:

“So we’ve now revoked California’s authority to conduct its own vetting.”

The bad news is that Newsom could be the next POTUS and would likely take his ruin of California nationwide.

On a tip from patthedog.