In Dante’s Inferno, the eighth circle of Hell is where fraudsters are punished for eternity. While the fate of souls is not our business, the new issue of National Review takes up the crisis of fraud in America today and what must be done about it.
Robert VerBruggen considers the costs of fraud for us “taxpaying chumps.” Annually, the number is “likely hundreds of billions,” amounting to “roughly $1,000 per American every year.” Fraud ran rampant during the pandemic, and we’re still coping with the mess. To clean it up, we need “basic oversight, stepped-up enforcement, and structural reforms.”
If a program spends government money, then someone, somewhere, has figured out a way to steal from it. Shocking amounts are lost because of mundane lies, and in some cases innocent mistakes, by those claiming benefits. Other schemes are larger in scale, more infuriating, and sometimes even kind of funny.
An entirely unfunny story of fraud, as explained in an eye-opening piece by Adam Omary and Jeffrey A. Singer, concerns autism overdiagnosis. “In the American health-care system, an autism diagnosis is a key that unlocks substantial public funding, and once that door opens, it is extraordinarily difficult to close.” Medicaid spending on autism therapy, much of it fraudulent in itself, has ballooned.
Also in this issue, we’re pleased to bring you an excerpt from Noah Rothman’s hotly anticipated and extraordinarily timely new book, Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America.
And there’s more:
- Are you, like Charles C. W. Cooke, irritated every time our insufferable ex-president pops back onto the national scene to opine and fret over “our democracy”? Then you will savor “I, Obama.”
- Dan McLaughlin deftly examines the recent Supreme Court decision on racial gerrymanders.
- We welcome Dominic Green to our pages for a discussion of a curious continental shift: “How the American Right Went European.”
- Rebeccah Heinrichs calls for an end to the feud between the U.S. and our European allies: “Strengthen NATO, Don’t Wreck It.”
- Can the academy be fixed? Abigail Anthony reports on promising developments: “How to Reform the Universities.”
- James Rosen takes us back to 1976, when the world heavyweight champ wrangled with a wrestler: “The Ali–Inoki Fight at 50.”
And speaking of the martial, er, arts, the latest installment of Our Spacious Skies is, er, punchy: “If Shakespeare had more money and less taste, WrestleMania could well have been his ultimate production.” So writes Guy Denton, our British-born Buckley Fellow, who went ringside for the WWE in Las Vegas.
The richness of this issue extends into Books, Arts & Manners: Andrew Stuttaford on whether Britain is the new sick man of Europe, Tevi Troy on a new exploration of Lewis & Clark, Paul Franz on two novels in the American tradition, Peter Tonguette on that Texan original, Larry McMurtry, and Vahaken Mouradian on a dynamic trio of new books. Martha Bayles and Ross Douthat each take a look at romance on screen.
Our columnists — Rob Long, James Lileks, Richard Brookhiser, Bryan Garner, and Christian Schneider — bring the humor and the meditative aperçus.
If you aren’t already a National Review subscriber, now is the time.