AFTERNOON VIEW FROM THE RIDGE:
GRINDING US DOWN
👇 👇 👇 👇
👉 THE COST OF FRAUD 🤔
Procter & Gamble just reported another soft quarter. 🤔
Revenue came in at $21.2 billion 👉 below expectations.
The company now expects only 1% to 3% sales growth next year.
This is Tide, Pampers, Crest, Gillette, and Bounty.
👉 When American families start buying smaller packages, waiting for sales, or switching to cheaper brands on basic necessities, the pressure has reached the kitchen table.
Diageo, one of the world’s largest beverage companies, saw North American sales drop 8.4%. 🤯
People are cutting back on alcohol or trading down. Both companies are responding the same way: 👉 cutting costs and eliminating jobs.
The little guy is getting squeezed from both ends. 😔
👉 Higher prices.
👉 Weaker paychecks.
And for years, a government that looked the other way while organized networks drained the system.
👉 That is the real cost of fraud.
For years, medical programs, daycare programs, housing programs, and disability systems were treated like open vaults. 🤬
👉 In Minnesota alone, feeding and daycare fraud schemes involving networks tied to certain immigrant communities ran into the hundreds of millions.
👉 Medicaid mills across multiple states billed for services that never happened.
👉 Mortgage and housing programs were gamed with fake documents and straw buyers.
The total taken from taxpayers runs into the tens of billions when you add it up across the country. 🫨🫨🫨
That money did not vanish. ✋
👉 It inflated costs.
👉 It distorted demand.
It forced working families to compete with a parallel economy funded by their own taxes.
👉 Now the bill is arriving.
Trump’s administration is not treating this as a public-relations problem. 🚫
✅ It is treating it as theft. 👍
👉 Task forces are moving on the networks.
👉 Prosecutors are filing cases.
👉 Payment systems are being tightened.
The spigots that fed the fraud are being turned off one by one. Money that used to disappear into fake claims is being clawed back or stopped before it goes out the door. 👏👏👏
This is what fighting for the little guy actually looks like.
👉 Not speeches.
👉 Not another program.
✅ It looks like shutting down the people who were stealing the money that should have stayed in the pockets of the Americans who earned it.
✅ It looks like making it harder for organized fraud to hide inside “social services.”
✅ It looks like forcing the system to remember that every dollar taken by a scam was a dollar that working people could no longer spend on their own kids’ diapers, their own groceries, or their own future.
The soft numbers at Procter & Gamble and Diageo are not random. 🚫
👉 They are the downstream result of years of extraction.
The RIDGE has said it for a long time: you cannot run a country by letting one group loot the productive class and expect demand to stay healthy forever.
👉 The cleanup is underway.
👉 It is messy.
👉 It is overdue.
And it is one of the clearest ways this administration is standing on the side of the people who were forced to fund the theft. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
J.T. ~ Voice of Reason