MSU Scholars Find $21T in Unauthorized Government Spending
msutoday.msu.edu
msutoday.msu.edu
Roughly speaking that's like 8.8% of the GDP of the planet. That... just doesn't make sense.
Or approximately 1/3 of the of the entire us GDP, compared to the 3% listed.
It could be a tank squadron on the books that wasn't removed when it got destroyed (or dismantled) or a whole military base decommissioned but still being depreciated.
This isn't (necessarily) "the Army spent 6.5 trillion too much in one year" nor is it "the Army lost 6.5 trillion".
A single dollar mistakenly accounted upfront can sometimes require at least twice that in corrective ledger entries.
Finally, consider a mistake of the type of over-estimating the value of a capital item by an order of magnitude. The corrective ledger entry would make it look like a huge loss was incurred in a particular year when the reality was much more benign. For the purposes of this report, that corrective entry needs to be supported by specific explanation which was missing.
The money is not missing, just not tracked up to expected accounting standards
Article from 2013: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pentagon-waste-specia...
Article from 2002: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-war-on-waste/
And you can Google [missing trillions] to find an article on the topic from any given year.
Maybe the reports don't say what they claim (I'm no accountant), but if they do, the only other possibility I see is outright fabrication of official documents (with signatures!) by people who aren't exactly anonymous loonies.
https://missingmoney.solari.com/dod-and-hud-missing-money-su...
It might also be write-downs on assets that should have been taken over decades and weren't.
I'd love an actual accountants' (or anyone else's) take on things, but that explains at least how both the total budget number and the adjustment number can both be correct.
Ie,adjustments were less surgically applied line-item corrections, and more bandaids to fix what could easily be underlying math errors.
So if a unit budget was $10mil one year, and could only account for $9mil, they might make $1mil in adjustments to avoid coming in under budget (a kiss of death, as your next year's budget would be cut by however short you were).
Lots of this kind of accounting was made public last yr in the army, so this isn't a total shock:https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-audit-army/u-s-army-f...
As it is, it's an eye-glazingly complicated story about government accounting regardless of how big the numbers are. It's hard to imagine the number of hours necessary to fact check the article not to mention finding experts in the field to break it all down.
Daily press does tend to go after blow-by-blow stuff but you're selling the media short. The entire Trump collusion thread right now is itself crazy complicated and it's in the news daily.
The entire financial system is built on fraud. I think that most people understand this at least subconsciously.
Many years ago, being honest and forthcoming was beneficial and people appreciated honesty.
If you made a mistake and were honest about it as soon as it came to your awareness, people would respect you for it and would be more lenient. These days this is not the case, being honest is actually a disadvantage. Lying and cheating is always the best option. People don't give a crap about honesty anymore, only money and social status.
So in a world where the value of honesty is a negative number, it's not surprising at all that fraud is rampant.
And 'not done strictly according to procedure' may or may not be a serious issue in any given case. Most bureaucracies have some rules that are incomplete, contradictory or simply infeasible.
Audits are a good idea, but I don't expect the $21T figure to stand, except perhaps in a purely formal way.
While it's still a complete shit show. There's a huge, almost click bate difference.
The report says not that they're "spending" $21T, but that they made a cumulative amount of errors and corrections in their vouchers equalling $21T and have really poor audit controls.
While bad audit controls is a legitimate and serious problem, it very much is not the same as what people normally think of as "Spending".
I recall a few (somewhere between 5 and 10) years ago they tried to do an audit and just threw their arms up in the air and said "impossible".
A bunch of people are going to choke on their morning coffee over this but I'm just going to say it: Trump promised to bring accountability to government and here's the DoD performing the impossible. I know, heresy...
The left - we're just going to force everything to be correct and just, including of course, and most importantly, who has money for what. Needless to say, historical societies went quite far in this, and to say it didn't happen is an understatement.
The right - just give more money to people who already have it, and clearly hoard it (that's what lowering taxes does), and they will make everything just and correct. Needless to say, historically this has been done and to say things did not in fact become fair and just is an incredible understatement.
Neither works. Obviously.
The article talks about unauthorized spending not that they had extra money or did over budget spending. So a lot of it could depend on how one defines unauthorized spending.
Skidmore got involved last spring when he heard Catherine Austin Fitts, former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, refer to a report which indicated the Army had $6.5 trillion in unsupported adjustments, or spending, in fiscal 2015. Given the Army’s $122 billion budget, that meant unsupported adjustments were 54 times spending authorized by Congress.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_United_States_federal_bud...
Federal debt (2017): $20T
$ 20,000,000,000,000 USD
We already now have https://usaspending.gov ( https://beta.usaspending.gov ) and expenditure line item metadata.
Would having traceable money in a distributed ledger help us keep track of money collected from taxpayers?
Obviously, the volatility of most cryptocurrencies would be disadvantageous for purposes of transferring and accounting for government spending. Isn't there a way to peg a cryptocurrency to the USD; even with Quantitative Easing? How is Quantitative Easing different from just deciding to print trillions more 'coins' in order to counter debt or inflation or deflation; why is the government in debt at all?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing
Say I have $100 in my Social Security Fund (in very non-aggressive investments which need to meet or exceed inflation) and the total supply of money (including paper notes and numbers in debit and credit columns of various public and private databases) the total supply of money is $1T with $1T in debt; if 1T is printed to pay for that debt, is my $100 in retirement savings then worth $50? Or is it more complex than that?