So when I first looked into Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrup-Grumman, L3Harris and others as an investor, I expected huge margins and booming profits.
Instead I found they have steady earnings with between -5 and +10 % margin. Hardly Republic-eating stuff.
I’m right there with you on public debt, although this is a problem throughout the rich world.
Sometimes it is not even that subtle. Just take a few minutes to read about Blackwater.
But what’s the scale of it? Is it enough to bring down the whole US?
My answer is not even close.
Pretty boring talking point, since it's mostly audited - the various secret programs are very small in comparison to public ones.
> Where is the money going?
Giant majority goes to various social and medical programs, that only baloon from aging of society and prolonged lifespans without extending workspan.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/2023_US_...
So, in short - pensioners eat all the money.
They keep it.
There’s a group of like 2000 people or so and they all change jobs every couple years and split the profits and buy houses in Maclean.
It’s distributed via consulting deals, retainer agreements, acquisitions, and so on.
You’re describing an incredibly dangerous and unstable game on their part. All it would take is one activist shareholder to blow that whole thing apart.
The following fascinating story about stealing money from Pacific fleet operations mentions 27 (twenty seven) whistleblowers whose reports were ignored:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/navy-repeatedl...
It's not super complicated. This is basically how the country is run and to some extent has always been run.
It’s enough money to an enormous amount for an individual - ie, your DC friends could buy half a dozen really nice mansions or something.
This is kind of corruption should never be tolerated, but neither should it be mythologized and feared.
Like you don't understand that if you're a senior executive at a massive defense contractor you can hire former generals who just signed off on your bid to lucrative consulting agreements, you can put politicians on your board of directors (ie Nikki Haley @ Boeing) and employ their children's PR firms and "strategy consultancies" and so on.
It's not fraud in the legal sense, it's just disgusting and I agree it shouldn't happen. But it's all right out in the open and how the system works.
I'm not really asking if you agree, I'm describing something I have seen first hand.
Second of all OK nice and where is all that money going? Sure, generals as directors, politicians making killer stock investments. But I don’t see these trillions in the form of corporate profits, or missing tax money. The money is almost entirely accounted for (ie audited) and the numbers are reasonable.
The US pissed away a ton of money in the middle east, but that money is hardly missing - we know where it went.
lmfao
The Pentagon has failed 6 straight audits. If you ever worked in corporate finance you know how epically dysfunctional financially a corporation must be to fail a single audit.
It has approx 4 trillion in assets. If only 5 -10 % of this is due to some kind of direct or indirect corruption we are talking about hundreds of billion in "waste".
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pentagon-fails-audit-sixth-...
Systematically making a huge (remember, we’re talking big enough to cause the downfall of the States) and then hiding the profits from retail investors? Different story.
Imagine the political windfall someone like Gary Gensler (SEC chair) or a Democrat could get from exposing that? The whole notion is very unstable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower%27s_farewell_addres...
That doesn’t mean a conspiracy as described is feasible.
How could such a group steal enough money to ruin the US? Skimming a little bit off the top, sure, but large-scale, systematic diversion of so much public money that it ends Pax Americana… no.
There are records of where the money comes from, and where it goes. There are far too many people who could become instant public darlings by exposing it. It’s unstable.
Some remedial reading for you:
https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Broke-Capitalism-America/dp/1...