Nick Shirley is not an auditor.
He’s not a state official, a federal investigator, or someone with a badge and a budget.
He’s an independent journalist who, for years now, has made a habit of asking questions other people stopped asking, and of following paper trails most people assume someone else is already monitoring. He’s not backed by an agency or a giant non-profit. He’s just a regular guy who thinks that if taxpayer money is being handed out in astonishing amounts, someone ought to be looking at where it actually ends up.
Recently, he took his camera and a small team across Minnesota to visit a series of daycare centers and other facilities that have received enormous sums of public money.
What he found were buildings that appeared deserted, offices that didn’t seem to conduct business at all, and operations that, to put it mildly, did not look like the kind of bustling enterprises capable of justifying the taxpayer reimbursements they’ve been collecting.
With nothing to aid them but open records, a few spreadsheets, and some camera equipment, Nick and his small team were able to identify more than $110 million in questionable payouts in one day.
In one day!
This should lead any reasonable person to wonder how, if it was this easy for one grassroots journalist to uncover this much waste and fraud, no one responsible for the oversight of this money ever noticed what was happening?
Right now, Minnesota is in the spotlight, but the structure of the problem is national: large flows of federal money, funneled through state agencies, dispersed through multiple layers until accountability is something everyone assumes is probably happening but no one actually cares to verify.
And that’s the best-case version. The worst-case is that this is a carefully orchestrated money-laundering scheme to allow the funneling of millions of dollars of government money into politicians' war chests.
We shall see…
The usual excuses—understaffing, budget constraints, competing priorities—lose credibility here because we’re not talking about accounting tricks or sophisticated shell games; we’re talking about businesses that appear abandoned or nearly so, receiving amounts of money that defy logic.
If millions of dollars can be siphoned away in absurdly obvious ways, and the system still fails to notice, then we are long past the point of treating this as bureaucratic clumsiness.
And while politicians will now issue statements, demand inquiries, and promise a renewed commitment to safeguarding taxpayer dollars, the simple truth is that none of this was exposed because the system corrected itself. It was exposed because someone outside the hierarchy bothered to follow the incentives far enough to see what everyone else missed or ignored.
Because what do you mean a twenty-something with an iPhone broke this story?
Why are these big-media talking heads even employed at this point? Just totally useless.
Of course the lesson for young people (and for families raising them) is not just that government programs can be wasteful, or that fraud is persistent wherever large sums of money flow, it’s that oversight without responsibility is theater, and systems that rely on detached bureaucracies to enforce stewardship will always fail more often than they succeed.
When responsibility is diffused, accountability evaporates, and the bill is quietly handed to those of us who were told someone else was watching the store.
If we want a better future than the one Nick is documenting, we need young people who recognize how incentives shape behavior, and how systems fail because no one feels the responsibility of ownership.
That work begins long before adulthood, and it begins in the home—with tools that treat kids as capable thinkers, not passive recipients of information.
To help families do that, we’ve bundled together some of our most substantial resources so that you can choose the path that best fits your family goals (and your children’s ages):
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Year of Growth — Teen Starter ($195)
A broad foundation that introduces key ideas and opportunities for application. -
Year of Growth — Teen Accelerator ($479) (most popular)
Everything in the Starter, plus lifetime access to the Tuttle Twins Academy and deeper challenges for teens ready to take more responsibility. -
Year of Growth — Kids Bundle ($286) (biggest savings)
A comprehensive lineup for younger children that blends stories, activities, character formation, and history in a way kids can enjoy and understand—all without diluting the ideas. -
Year of Growth — History Set ($128)
An honest exploration of America’s past that emphasizes choices, incentives, and consequences across generations.
You can review these options, and even compare them side by side, to choose what fits your family best by clicking here.
People like Nick will continue doing the work of exposing what others overlook, and I’m grateful for that.
But if we want the next generation to do better, we need to give them tools that teach them not just what to think, but how to think. We’re going to need a million Nick Shirleys if we’re going to set this ship to rights.
The good news is that with parents like you using resources like ours, I think we might just have what it takes to do it.
— Connor
