Walz Pulls Out: Score Another Another One for Racism, Coupled with Democratic Party and Media Ineptitude

Simple question folks: how much money was stolen in the fraud hyped by Republicans and media clown Nick Shirley? My guess is that if we did a poll of highly knowledgeable people, those who regularly follow the news closely, we would get a range of answers from less than $1 billion to $20 billion. Who knows where we would end up with the larger public? Trump and some of the MAGA crew might even throw out numbers in the trillions.

I’m not picking on people’s ignorance. The point is whether or not this should have been a career-ending scandal for Tim Walz absolutely depends on the number. There will always be fraud in any government social program, just like there is some level of fraud in everything in the private sector.

The question must always be how much? Sometimes even high levels of fraud are apparently tolerated. As I noted previously, the Inspector General of the Small Business Administration (SBA) identified $200 billion of potentially fraudulent payments in the Paycheck Protection Program, an emergency pandemic started in Trump’s first term. This would have been more than 15 percent of the money that went out the door.

That massive level and percentage of fraud proved not to be career ending for Donald Trump. In fact, it was not even career ending for Linda McMahon, the SBA administrator responsible for overseeing the program. Trump promoted her to Education Secretary in his current term.

There were some consequences. Hannibal Ware, the Inspector General who uncovered the fraud, who is Black, was fired by Donald Trump at the start of his second term.

But getting back to the issue of Walz being chased out of public life because of Republicans hysterically yelling fraud, it really is essential that we start demanding some context for these allegations. We need to know how large the fraud is relative to the size of the program.

This is a drum I have been beating on pretty much forever. The point seems simple and obvious. Big numbers, in the millions, billions, and trillions, are virtually meaningless to almost everyone. News outlets are not providing their audiences with information when they tell us that $500 billion or $1 trillion will be spent on a program; especially since they often don’t even bother to tell us whether the spending is over one year, five years, or longer.

I have never found any reporter who could tell me with a straight face that they are conveying information by just throwing out these really big numbers. The big victory on this score was getting then New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan, along with Washington Editor David Leonhardt, to strongly agree on this point.

I thought this was the beginning of a change in practice at the Times, which given its standing in the media hierarchy, likely would have led to a change in practice in the media more broadly. After all, it is essentially costless to take the five seconds to add that the $100 billion annual food stamp budget comes to 1.4 percent of the federal budget.

But nothing changed at the Times or anywhere else, and now we have Tim Walz’s political corpse on our hands as result. While the need to express these numbers in some context might be too complicated for the great minds in the Democratic Party to understand, I can guarantee that it’s not too complicated for Republican political operatives.

We can be absolutely certain that they will highlight every real or imagined incident of fraud in every government program that they don’t like. And in most of these cases they will be able to point to some REALLY BIG NUMBER, which will sound like a huge problem to the vast majority of people who hear it.

Many people may still support the programs and the politicians who promote them, because they think it is important that children, the disabled, and the elderly get food and healthcare. But many people, including many very moderate centrist types, may turn against them, as apparently they have done with Walz, because they can’t tolerate large amounts of waste and fraud.

The Republicans have massive amounts of money and most the media pushing their agenda 24-7. Progressives, and really anyone who supports democracy, can’t afford to be stupid. Our current line seems to be: “we have been losing for fifty years, why change now?”

There are many serious practical and ideological issues that divide the non-fascists among us; but demanding that numbers be put in context should not be one of them. Unfortunately, the Republicans won’t agree to be as stupid as we are.

They will constantly yell about massive fraud in public programs, especially when they involve Black and brown people, and point fingers at the politicians who support them. Tim Walz is an unfortunate victim of this crap, but we can be sure that he will not be the last.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

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