How Much Fraud Is In The US Economy?

Mr. B. looked with some dread at the question: How much of the US economy is fake?

If you consider US state and federal government going to waste and fraud, the answer is a heckuva lot. 

US Government Accountability Office puts annual fraud in US government programs at 233 Billion to 521 billion per year.

Elon Musk had an estimate of annual fraud in US federal government spending at 1.5 trillion – equivalent to slightly over half of all the 2.5 trillion dollars in taxes collected from American individual taxpayers per year.

In other words, if we got rid of the fraud at the federal level, we could pay half the federal income taxes we pay now with the exact same results.

This isn't even touching wasteful government spending at the Federal and State level.

At the State level, there's quite a lot going on as we saw in Minnesota and California which ranges into the billions of dollars.

We've got some of that here in Michigan, such as the billion dollars  spent on increasing student reading scores, only to have the effect be minimal and barely measurable:

 

The Detroit News: Michigan falls short of reading goal despite $1 billion in spending

 

Any bets that some of that spending went straight to waste and fraud at the Michigan variation of Learing centers? 

 

Nor does it cover the golden parachutes politicians prepared for their cronies in Dearborn Heights, to the tune of millions of taxpayer money spent 

 

The Detroit News: Former Dearborn Heights mayor inked severance contracts worth over $1M, records show 

 

Nor even the $20 million that went from Gov Whitmer's MEDC diect to embezzler Fey Beydoun.  Small potatoes in the world of government spending fraud, but $20 million is $20 million, after all.

 

Nor does this cover the nominally non-fraudulent but inefficient government spending such as on internet broadband connectivity and EV chargers and California high-speed rail to nowhere (which may indeed have fraudulent spending as a part of it).

 

Nor does it count the wasteful spending of billions of dollars by businesses at government directive or urging such as the spending on trying to wholesale replace internal combustion vehicles with electric ones. 

 

Fraud and wasteful spending combined at the federal and state levels easily exceeds a couple trillion dollars each year and every year. 

 

Perhaps it is time that stops?