Minnesota politics has two arguments about money and they never end. One side wants to raise taxes to fund more. The other wants to cut taxes to fund less. They've been having that argument my whole adult life, and the honest truth is that neither side ever wins it, because Minnesotans want both good services and a fair bill, and the argument forces them to pick.
Here's a third way, and it comes straight out of the thing I've spent the most time on in this series: fraud.
The money is already there — it's just been stolen
I documented earlier what fraud and waste actually cost this state — and what a dollar of real oversight returns. The Feeding Our Future scandal alone ran into the hundreds of millions. The state's own auditors have found program after program with weak controls and money going out the door to people who had no right to it. And when the state actually funds oversight and enforcement, the return is extraordinary: the documented figure from real audits is on the order of several dollars recovered for every dollar spent catching cheats. Fraud enforcement isn't a cost center. It's one of the highest-yield investments government can make.
But here's the problem. When the state recovers stolen money today, it disappears into the general fund. Nobody sees it. Nobody feels it. So there's no constituency for it — anti-fraud work is a line item that competes with everything else, and it never gets the funding it earns, because no voter ever got a check with "fraud recovery" printed on it.
The fix: a dividend, funded by the cheats
So change where the money goes. Every dollar Minnesota recovers from fraud, overpayment, and waste — every clawback, every restitution order, every penalty, every dollar an audit stops from going out the door — goes into a dedicated fund, and once a year that fund is paid out to Minnesotans as a visible, universal rebate. Catch the fraud, cut the check.
Watch what that does to the politics. Suddenly every Minnesotan has a direct, personal stake in the state catching cheats — the bigger the recovery, the bigger the check. Government efficiency stops being a slogan that half the electorate rolls its eyes at and becomes a constituency: people will demand that the Legislature fund the auditors and the fraud unit, because it's their money on the line. The fraudster who steals from a child-nutrition program is no longer stealing from an abstraction called "the state." He's stealing from your rebate, and you'll want him caught.
And it breaks the loop. It's not a tax increase — no one pays more. It's not a service cut — no program loses funding. It's money that was never supposed to leave the public's hands, going back to the public's hands, with a receipt.
The honest concession
I'll be straight about the limits. Fraud recovery is real money but it's not infinite money; a dividend funded purely by clawbacks will be modest in most years, and I'd rather promise a real hundred dollars than a fantasy thousand. The point isn't the size of any single check — it's the incentive it creates and the accountability it buys. Second, this has to be walled off from gimmickry: the fund is for genuine recoveries and verified prevented losses, certified by the auditor, not for whatever a politician wants to relabel as "savings" in an election year. The rule has to be strict or it becomes the thing it's meant to replace.
What I'd actually do
Create the Fraud Recovery Dividend Fund. All fraud, waste, and overpayment recoveries and penalties flow in; the Legislative Auditor certifies what qualifies.
Pay it out annually, universally, visibly. Every Minnesotan, same amount, with a statement showing where it came from.
Fund the enforcement that fills it. Staff the fraud units, the audits, and the prosecutions — because now the whole state has a reason to want them funded.
Catch the fraud, cut the check. Every dollar we claw back from the cheats goes straight back to you — and the cheats finally have an entire state watching them.
First the facts. Then the fix.
Sources
This is a policy position. The fraud, oversight-return, and program-control findings referenced are documented in this series' earlier articles on what fraud costs Minnesota (drawing on Office of the Legislative Auditor reports, U.S. Department of Justice Feeding Our Future prosecutions, and audited oversight-return figures). The dividend structure is modeled loosely on dedicated-fund payout mechanisms such as Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend, adapted to a recovery-funded rather than resource-funded base.
The size of any annual dividend would depend on certified recoveries and is described in general terms; the fund's qualifying-recovery rules would be set in legislation. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.