“Set a thief to catch a thief“ – Proverb
On Thursday, VP JD Vance insinuated that welfare recipients are driving foreign luxury vehicles. He asked a crowd of MAGAs in Bangor, Maine:
“But why is it that we have people who drive Lamborghinis, and that is true, people driving Lamborghinis who are getting low-income assistance that’s supposed to go for housing and food for our people?
Vance was not the first Republican to make this argument. In 1976, during his first national campaign, Ronald Reagan warned Americans about welfare recipients living a luxurious life while collecting federal benefits. He told Americans that these so-called welfare queens were Cadillac-driving grifters with multiple aliases, who were working the system to generate annual incomes of as much as $150,000 ($900,000 in today’s money).
Vance’s exploration of the subject was wider than Reagan’s. His question was one element of a larger charge that honest taxpaying Mainers were suffering at the hands of their avaricious fellow citizens. The VP outlined the big picture. And reassured listeners that he and the administration were championing their interests.
“It’s about protecting you, the money you send to the government, and the services that you rely on. So, for once, for the first time in a very long time, you’ve got an administration in Washington, D.C., that is fighting for you, fighting to protect your tax dollars and fighting to put the fraudsters in prison, which is where they belong.”
Vance made no reference to his boss’s multiple felony convictions for fraud. And the audience remained untroubled by Trump’s criminal record. Their indifference to Trump’s fraud convictions told you everything about the sincerity of Vance’s concern. He also skipped over accusations that Trump and his family were privately profiting from his public position. Instead, he doubled down on his bad neighbors theme.
“It is unbelievable, unbelievable, how much you have been fleeced by your own government over the past 15, 20, 30 years. Nobody, nobody, was looking at this. Nobody was asking difficult questions like, for example, are dead people getting food stamps? Okay? Call me old-fashioned. I don’t think the dead people eat, so certainly they don’t need food stamps.”
Vance then warned his listeners that not only were these benefit swindlers robbing their neighbors, they were also stealing their identities, with all the concomitant pain that caused. Was this escalation of the consequences a casual afterthought? Or was the VP adding acute fear of personal jeopardy to a general sense that people were getting over on the government? The answer is evident. Vance is a careful politician who sticks to a script. This rules out ‘casual’.
They’re stealing somebody else’s identity, claiming hospice services, and then when that hard-working American goes to apply for some other benefit, they get tagged by the bank as being a fraudster, even though it wasn’t them. It was somebody who had stolen their identity. Who here knows somebody who’s had their identity stolen? Isn’t that a shame? And the reason why we have allowed identity theft to fester in this country is that the government wasn’t going after fraud.
When Reagan offered his rebuke of welfare queens, he at least had a real example – Linda Taylor. A mixed-race woman who had committed fraud against the federal government. Reagan described the situation thus:
“In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record. She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare.
In fact, he added, “her tax-free cash income alone has been running at $150,000 a year.”
However, one example is no proof of a trend. And the plural of ‘anecdotes’ is not ‘evidence’. Josh Levin, in his 2019 book, “The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth,” wrote: “Linda Taylor … had as much in common with a typical welfare rule breaker as a bank robber does with someone who swipes a piece of penny candy.” Yet “Taylor’s mere existence gave credence to a slew of pernicious stereotypes about poor people and black women.”
Vance, on the other hand, produced no Linda Taylor. He offered no examples of the type of behavior he said was rife. The reader can judge why.
Vance then brought his analysis of welfare fraud to a close with a tribute to Trump.
And ladies and gentlemen, that changed the moment Donald J. Trump became the President of the United States.
The cynic might say that if anyone knows fraud, it’s Trump. So who better to kick off an investigation?
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