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Comment by kylecazar | Hacker News Reader

There was an interesting article going around explaining accounting artifacts in the DoD from the late '90s. See 'the myth of the $600 hammer':

https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the...

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>The military bought the hammer, Kelman explained, bundled into one bulk purchase of many different spare parts. But when the contractors allocated their engineering expenses among the individual spare parts on the list-a bookkeeping exercise that had no effect on the price the Pentagon paid overall-they simply treated every item the same. So the hammer, originally $15, picked up the same amount of research and development overhead-$420-as each of the highly technical components, recalled retired procurement official LeRoy Haugh. (Later news stories inflated the $435 figure to $600.)

"we didn't ACTUALLY spend that much on a hammer, we just averaged it out across a bulk purchase! See, we aren't terrible with money."

Framing something as 'the myth of the $600 hammer' is implicitly pointing to external sources (congress, journalists) and messaging that they 'invented a myth' that the military spent $600 on a hammer. They didn't invent anything. They worked with the information that was provided to them by the military.

If you wanted to discuss the same issue, but under a framing that wasn't disingenuous, you could title it something like 'the reality of abysmal and misleading accounting throughout the military and their contractors'.

It's still a story of people getting mad about something they don't understand.

If someone shoots me in the foot I don't need to understand the mechanics of a gun to get upset about it.

If someone has a good reason to shoot you in the foot, your being upset about it doesn't necessarily make it the wrong choice.

What's the good reason for this type of pro rata accounting?

Given "a bookkeeping exercise that had no effect on the price the Pentagon paid overall", I'd propose "it saved time, which costs taxpayers money".

Given the hammer was actually $15, there's presumably a corresponding item that's also listed at $600 for ease of accounting that normally costs something like $1,200. "Pentagon gets 50% off computer monitor" is a less exciting headline, though.

A quick look at an example of the big-ticket items immediately shows that's not what's going on here. From the article:

> The investigation also revealed that Raytheon Technologies had raised the price of Stinger missiles from $25,000 to more than $400,000 per unit. “Even accounting for inflation and some improvements, that’s a seven-fold increase,” Shay Assad, a former Pentagon acquisitions official, told 60 Minutes.