Fraudsters have stolen about $9 billion in taxpayer money, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson said last week:

What we see in Minnesota is not a handful of bad actors committing crimes. It’s a staggering, industrial-scale fraud. It’s swamping Minnesota and calling into question everything we know about our state.

U.S. authorities are unsure of the exact amount stolen. But Thompson said that of the $18 billion the state has spent on Medicaid since 2019, “on the order of half or more” has likely been taken.

• Take Salim A. Said and Abdulkadir Nur Salah, for example. They set up a restaurant in Minneapolis and claimed to be feeding 5,000 children a day, earning them $16 million from Minnesota’s child nutrition program. They used that money to buy a luxury mansion just down the road. Qamar Ahmed Hassan and Sahra Mohamed Nur were also involved in the scheme, buying a block of shops close by, before ultimately pleading guilty to money laundering and wire fraud. The fraud was enabled by “Feeding Our Future,” a “nonprofit” apparently set up to enable fraudulent claims and then take a cut.

Most of the thieves involved in this particular scheme—and many others—are from Somalia. The total value of everything produced by Somalia’s economy in one year is $14 billion. Defrauding Minnesota may be Somalia’s largest source of income.

And that’s just one state. As the Wall Street Journal points out:

Something is profoundly wrong with the U.S. welfare system—a problem that runs far deeper and is more dangerous than the shocking fraud in Minnesota that has been making headlines.

They did the math. If you take the $1.4 trillion the federal government spends on welfare and divide it equally among the 19.8 million families the government classifies as poor, they’d each get $70,000.

So just how much fraud is happening across America’s 50 states? What about in Britain, Canada, Australia and others? Are we being drained of billions or even trillions of dollars?

It’s a self-inflicted curse that brings to mind Moses’s description of what would happen to us if we failed to follow God: “The fruit of thy land, and all thy labours, shall a nation which thou knowest not eat up; and thou shalt be only oppressed and crushed always.”