In these days of rampant virtue signaling, politicians, corporations and socially wired individuals all try to convince you that they care the most about doing the right thing. Alas, while we’ve all been recovering from the COVID-19 crisis, plenty of old-fashioned grifters have seized the day.
On Sunday The Associated Press released a stunning investigation into pandemic fraud finding that large numbers of Americans — of all stripes, it appears — fraudulently helped themselves to colossal chunks of federal COVID-19 relief money.
Any huge program created in an emergency is bound to encounter some corrupt actors, but the scale of the fraud in this instance indicates that the federal government did a thoroughly lousy job of erecting the necessary protections as it cut check after check to the unworthy. The news agency called it “the greatest grift in U.S. history,” and that’s saying something.
