Budget
by Kerim
It seems that US troops in Iraq are short on rifles, and are forced to use confiscated AK-47s! Maybe that’s because the US military doesn’t know where your tax dollars are going. That’s right, there is more than a trillion dollars missing and unaccounted for!
A study by the Defense Department’s inspector general found that the Pentagon couldn’t properly account for more than a trillion dollars in monies spent. A GAO report found Defense inventory systems so lax that the U.S. Army lost track of 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units.And before the Iraq war, when military leaders were scrambling to find enough chemical and biological warfare suits to protect U.S. troops, the department was caught selling these suits as surplus on the Internet “for pennies on the dollar,” a GAO official said.
Given these glaring gaps in the management of a Pentagon budget that is approaching $400 billion, the coming debate is shaping up as a bid to gain the high ground in the battle against waste, fraud and abuse.
We are spending $400 billion a year and don’t know how much of it is being spent! Click here for more information and to sign a petition.
[...] I think Taiwanese tend to lack a sense of perspective about their national problems. They seem to think they live in the darkest backwaters of the third world and look up to America as a paragon of modernity. For this reason I often try to put things into perspective when talking about Taiwanese politics. While I certainly think any president who spends public funds on having a diamond ring personally fitted for his wife should be forced to resign, whether or not it was legal to do so, the total amount under investigation in Taiwan is less than half a million dollars. I imagine Chen Shui-bien sitting Dr. Evil-like saying, “I will steal half a million dollars!” – and then I will give them receipts! Compare that with the more than one trillion dollars missing from the U.S. Military budget – without receipts! [...]