In Dante’s Inferno, the eighth circle of Hell is where fraudsters are punished for eternity. While the fate of souls is not our business, the new issue of National Review takes up the crisis of fraud in America today and what must be done about it.

Robert VerBruggen considers the costs of fraud for us “taxpaying chumps.” Annually, the number is “likely hundreds of billions,” amounting to “roughly $1,000 per American every year.” Fraud ran rampant during the pandemic, and we’re still coping with the mess. To clean it up, we need “basic oversight, stepped-up enforcement, and structural reforms.”

If a program spends government money, then someone, somewhere, has figured out a way to steal from it. Shocking amounts are lost because of mundane lies, and in some cases innocent mistakes, by those claiming benefits. Other schemes are larger in scale, more infuriating, and........

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