Tom Bilyeu

It collects the highest income taxes in the country.

It spends over $300 billion a year.

So how on God's green earth is it falling apart?

A major New City journalism investigation, this is important, please hold this one in your mind, based on state audits, federal indictments, and data direct from local governments says that the answer is simple.

The money is being stolen.

at a scale that is genuinely hard to believe.

During COVID, California processed so many unemployment claims that fraud specialist Heywood Talco, who's the CEO of LexisNexis, the risk solutions, noted at one point there were more people applying for unemployment benefits than there were total adults in the state.

you're not going to get a much clearer signal than that, that you have a massive fraud problem.

You have more people applying for unemployment than actually exist.

Here's what happened.

Going into COVID, California's unemployment fund was already in terrible trouble.

There was only $3.3 billion in reserves.

That is a minuscule amount for a state of California size.

The U.S.

Department of Labor had already ranked California dead last in the nation, calling them the least adequately funded of any unemployment program in the country.

How could that be?

How could we always be so low?

Going to hear fraud as a punchline through all of this.

When the COVID fraud wave hit, California happily shipped all of their savings to the deserving and the fraudulent alike, burning through their savings in just months.

And then California said, hold my beer and became the first state to tap emergency federal loans so they could keep paying all of the fraudulent claims.