Unemployment Insurance fraud is not easy to pull off because of the involvement of employers, but it's still rampant. One rapper who boasted on YouTube about making a lot of money from UI fraud was charged with stealing $1.2 million in jobless benefits.
“As much as $400 billion may have been lost to fraud by way of falsified claims for COVID-related unemployment benefits," says Congressman Gary Palmer. "Identity theft has become rampant and foreign crime rings have stolen hundreds of billions of dollars."
"This is one of the greatest thefts of American tax dollars in history, totaling more than the entire 2021 budgets of the Army and Navy combined, and more than the combined budgets of eight states."
Does anyone still want to argue that govt knows better how to spend our money?
Here is some data.
Arizona has said that it saw 570,400 initial PUA (Pandemic Unemployment Assistance) claims filed in the week ending October 10, 2020. A month later, after hiring ID.me to filter new applications, that number had plunged by 99% to 6,700.
In December, the ID.me contract was expanded to include 'continuing PUA claims' — which at that point were numbering 268,556 per week. One week later, the number of continuing PUA claims had fallen to 85,174 — a decrease of 68.3%.
Experiences similar to Arizona's can be seen across the country.
Florida's official dashboard shows 111,904 unemployment claims in the week ending Jan. 30, and then 10,480 the following week, when fraud controls were introduced — a drop of 90.6%.
In Colorado, according to the official dashboard, 2,107,988 claims have been sent to ID.me for testing. Of those, 268,060 — or just 12.7% — have been verified.
In Nebraska, the overall fraud rate within the unemployment program was 65.97%, per state auditor.
In New York, weekly PUA claims averaged 43,863 in the four weeks to March 20. Then fraud-prevention measures were put in place, and the average immediately dropped to 3,421 — a fall of 92.2%.
In California, PUA claims hit 405,878 in the week of August 29, and 440,882 in the week of September 5. After October 1, when controls were put in, the numbers immediately crashed — there were just 14,843 in the week ending October 3 — and have stayed low ever since.
Fraud doesn't happen evenly. Every state has a different system for claiming benefits, and tends to see a surge in fraudulent claims when a criminal syndicate manages to hack that particular system. (Pennsylvania, for instance, saw a large spike in fraudulent claims in May 2020.)
Here's the killer.
If fraud rates fall dramatically in one program or in one state, that doesn't mean fraud overall has fallen — it is just as likely to have moved to a different program or location.
How Fraud Shows Up in Economic Statistics
The fraud is not hard to see in economic statistics, once you realize it's there.
Since the CARES Act boosted unemployment benefits, continued claims have consistently been significantly higher than the total number of unemployed.
The new federal unemployment benefits were also large enough that many Americans applied for them even if they might not have filed for unemployment in the past.
Nevertheless, the economic statistics are entirely consistent with widespread unemployment fraud.
During the pandemic — between the week of March 21, 2020, and the week of June 5, 2021 — there have been a total of 83,506,986 initial claims for unemployment insurance. On top of that, there have been 27,315,075 initial claims for PUA.
Add them up, and you get more than 110 million layoffs over the course of the pandemic — out of a total workforce of about 15o million people.
That is, to put it simply, bullshit!
Recently, U.S. has been experiencing a period of massive labor shortages, where employers have been desperate for workers and certainly haven't been laying them off in large numbers. Yet initial unemployment claims are still running at more than 3 times their pre-pandemic level.
Fraudsters naturally gravitate to where their fraud is easiest. And with roughly half the states still having very weak protection against this kind of fraud, that is where the criminals are concentrating their efforts.
When Tupac Shakur and Dianne Feinstein Filed for Unemployment
Unemployment fraud is so rampant, it spares no one's identity.
U.S. Catholic bishops passed a controversial proposal on communion, advancing a push to deny President Biden the sacrament for his stance on abortion."
NYT excoriates Catholic bishops for this decision (73% voted in favor), likening Biden to Pope.
NYT has its own view of what Catholicism ought to be about today, as they impute the Pope's views on Christianity:
"Mr. Biden, like Pope Francis, embodies a liberal Christianity focused less on sexual politics and more on racial inequality, climate change and poverty." -- NYT
NYT is Livid
"The move to target a president, who has regularly attended Mass throughout his life, is striking coming from Catholic leaders, particularly after many conservative Catholics turned a blind eye to the sexual improprieties of former President Donald J. Trump." -- NYT
Biden says he stressed on Putin that if Russia interferes in American elections, Russia will lose credibility. Same if Navalny dies in prison.
I am sure that put the fear of God in Putin. And they said Trump was soft on Putin.
2. Biden's Press Conference
Biden says he gave a list of sixteen infrastructures in America (like energy supply, water supply, etc.) that Russia must not attack, because it would matter.
Once again, Putin must be cowering in his boots, now that Biden has given him a list.
3. Biden's Press Conference
"No, there were no threats. Just simple assertions made. As a matter of fact, Putin quoted my mom. You may be surprised to know that it was very ... colloquial!"
This is an utter and complete lie. Who has looked at the mutations that the coronavirus underwent in making a jump from the bats to the humans? Nobody. Those mutations cannot be found. This was a lie when Fauci said it. Question is did he lie willfully or was he duped.
"A day before the teleconference [on 1/31/20], Kristian Andersen, an expert in infectious disease genomics at the Scripps Research Translational Institute in California, had told Fauci that the genetic structure of the virus looked like it might have been engineered in a lab."
Does this sound like prominent virologists agreeing the virus did not come from a lab?
Dr. Fauci clearly and unequivocally lied in the above segment.
"I expected that I was paying this fortune to learn how to think. But they're forcing you to think the way they want you to think. I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to N Korea that I started worrying." -- Yeonmi Park
Those similarities include anti-Western sentiment, collective guilt and suffocating political correctness.
Yeonmi saw red flags immediately upon arriving at the school.
During orientation, she was scolded for admitting she enjoyed classic literature such as Jane Austen.
If there was high motivation to engineer this virus and it is not all that difficult to engineer, then why is it so hard to believe it could have been engineered? This is not evidence of the virus having been engineered, but why is it "highly unlikely" to have been engineered?
Experts like Scott Gottlieb (who didn't become a darling of the pharma industry and govt bureaucrats alike without knowing which side his bread is buttered) are spouting a bunch of technical jargon, followed by an ad-hoc opinion: "it's highly unlikely the virus was engineered."
Fauci's credibility is shot with millions and he has made some very flawed calls, but I can tell you this: Delta variant of Covid-19 is indeed a far deadlier strain and the fact that Pfizer & Moderna vaccines are very effective against it is terrific news. cnbc.com/2021/06/08/fau…
The Delta variant accounts for 60% of new cases in the U.K. In the U.S., it is more than 6% of cases scientists have been able to sequence, but the actual number is likely higher.
The Delta variant is the dominant strain in India and it is wreaking absolute havoc there. I personally know of a 10-year old girl who got it and was hospitalized, spent two weeks in ICU. Thank God, she survived. So this strain is nothing to mess about.