Where's the Money?

[FRED]

When does the waste stop? When the US no longer has anything to waste.

[Uncle Jack]

Re: Where's the Money?

Perhaps that's your plunge protection team, right there in the pentagon defending capitalism with all of their might, er, I mean all of our money.

[nathanhulick]

Re: Where's the Money?

What is a couple of trillion dollars between friends!??

just kidding, but seriously, it is not that big of a deal. If the government found that money, they would just waste it on something else anyways...

[World Traveler]

Answers- Catherine Fitts and Chalmers Johnson

Chalmers Johnson has recently written an article on how military spending is slowly bleeding U.S. dry and how we may now be beyond point of no return re: long term economic impacts. He's well-respected (see bibliography at bottom of article) commentator and author.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/012308E.shtml

Catherine Austin Fitts (former Dillon Reed partner and former Under-secretary at HUD) has been examining missing trillions in gov't budgets for years and managed to compile a great deal of data and related articles.

Many of the articles she has compiled in first link below are from mainstream publications on various facets of the missing money.

http://www.solari.com/learn/articles_missingmoney.htm

Second link below is an older link she put up around 2002-2003 on same topic (less detail). She also does a good job of in second link of comparing costs of some things this money could have been spent on instead (infrastructure, education, increased savings for Joe SixPack due to lower taxes for average citizen, etc., etc.).

http://www.whereisthemoney.org/

[Verrocchio]

Re: Answers- Catherine Fitts and Chalmers Johnson

Lest we forget, military expenditures add nothing to the productive capacity of the nation. This is not to say that an effective national defense is unnecessary, just stating an economic fact.

It's also a testimony to the alienation of the electorate that the Defense Secretary can acknowledge that he doesn't know what has happened to 1/4 of the funds expended and it causes barely a ripple on the placid pond of public opinion.