As you know I believe the US spend way too much taxpayer money on weapons and so-called defense.
The Pentagon is a problem….a problem we refuse to solve.
A sad indictment of the system…..we spend over $700 billion a year on the Pentagon and they seldom ever pass an audit of their practices and expenditures…..
When the Pentagon launched its first-ever independent financial audit back in 2017, backers of accountability in government welcomed it as a major step for a department with a track record of financial boondoggles.
But the Defense Department failed that audit – and the next two as well. Now lawmakers are introducing a bipartisan bill that would impose a penalty for any part of the department, including the military, that fails to undergo a “clean” audit.
“The Pentagon and the military industrial complex have been plagued by a massive amount of waste, fraud and financial mismanagement for decades. That is absolutely unacceptable,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who co-sponsored the bill with Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, along with Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Mike Lee, R-Utah.
Despite having trillions of dollars in assets and receiving hundreds of billions in federal dollars annually, the department has never detailed its assets and liabilities in a given year. For the past three financial years, the Defense Department’s audit has resulted in a “Disclaimer of Opinion,” meaning the auditor didn’t get enough accounting records to form an assessment.
And yet they get increasingly more and more cash…..
If the taxpayer truly wants to know where their money is spent and wasted….then look no further than the Pentagon.
I have written many times about the extreme money that the US throws at the Pentagon…..after the fall of the Soviet Union one would think that without a major competitor on the international stage we could save some cash and lessen the cash thrown at the Pentagon….but that has not happened…..why is that?
It is not rocket science….the M-IC needs an enemy and the government will create a threat as needed….
Strange, isn’t it? Our secretary of state emphatically claims that China has been acting “more aggressively abroad” and behaving “increasingly in adversarial ways.” No, he insists, we’re not exactly at the edge of a new cold war or planning, in the style of the last century, to “contain China.” All this country is doing is “uphold[ing] this rules-based order — that China is posing a challenge to. Anyone who poses a challenge to that order, we’re going to stand up and — and defend it.” Ah, you remember that “rules-based order,” don’t you? The one this country has sponsored in this century with an endless series of losing wars across the Greater Middle East and Africa, right?
Our secretary of defense, mentioning no country by name (cough, cough, but you know which one he has in mind), recently said: “I’ll never forget the valor that I saw and the lessons that I learned as a commander in Iraq and CENTCOM. But the way we’ll fight the next major war is going to look very different from the way we fought the last ones.” (The assumption being, of course, that such a war will indeed be fought.) And the Pentagon is already focusing its energy on just such a possible future war against “near-peer competitors” from the Arctic to the South China Sea. Even President Biden, addressing Congress and the nation, emphasized that “we’re in competition with China and other countries to win the twenty-first century.”
Why the Pentagon Budget Never Goes Down
There you have it…..what was once the USSR is now China…..
Just think what this country could do with $700 billion it would save with some reduction to the funds at the Pentagon…..
Just a thought!
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