In November, the Minnesota Center for Fiscal Excellence (MCFE) — one of the best policy organizations in the state — hosted its 99th Annual Meeting and Policy Forum.
The last panel of the day was “Views from the Legislature” and featured Sen. Carla Nelson (R) and Sen. Erin Maye Quade (DFL). Obviously, in a panel on legislative action at an event on Minnesota’s fiscal policy, the question of fraud came up. In the very last remark of the session, Sen. Maye Quade said, in reply to a question:
One of the best ways to prevent fraud in a program is to make it universal.
I was sitting at a table with a number of state government employees whose jaws nearly fell into their lunch. “How do you make autism centers universal?” one of them asked. “Is she going to give everybody autism?”
It is true, perhaps, that if you eliminate all eligibility requirements for welfare and give it to absolutely everybody you will eliminate welfare fraud. It is also true that doing so would be enormously expensive, to say nothing of the impacts on employment and the economy more generally of both the payments to workers and the taxes neccessary to fianance all this.
The MCFE events are some of the most enlightening public policy events in Minnesota, so keep an eye out for the next one.
