Its not that the pentagon is unable to do proper accounting, its that they are unwilling to and no one is about to throw them in jail for it so they get away with it.
After out failure in Iran, it's pretty clear to me that the congressional-military-industrial is a grift on a scale so vast that we need Carl Sagan to explain it. .
"A major significant issue is debt financing. Since the wars launched after 11 September 2001, the United States has relied heavily on borrowing rather than taxation to finance military operations. For this reason, some refer to the post-2001 wars as ‘credit card wars’".
Imagine conducting wars against other countries by borrowing money from other countries to conduct them. Its gonna be fun when the debt comes due...
By design
The real religion in America is the financial system
Everyone prays to it and holds complete and total faith in it ... their faith in that system is the only thing that makes it all possible and functional. They have legions of priests, brotherhoods, churches of finance, cathedrals of corporations and basilicas of banking and entire congregations of millions of followers who all pray to this system each and every day. As long as they all believe and hold faith in this system, it stays alive and continues to grow, even as it eats up all their lives and everything they own.
And the ending is also tied to their faith.
As soon as enough of them stop believing in it ... the whole thing will come crashing down.
So keep praying to your church of finance America ... it's the only thing keeping it alive.
That is just capitalism, and is one of its main failures.
The US is just what happens when capitalism is unleashed and allowed to do whatever.
It is and it isn't ... the whole system can be explained away as just runaway greed and organized chaos ... but there is a large portion of it that exists just out of the sheer will and faith of a majority of people. Much of the wealth that exists doesn't truly exist, it's just promises stacked on promises stacked on promises backed by the faith of everyone that those promises are legitimate, even though they all know that none of if can ever possibly be repaid. It's a faith based system.
Yes, that is capitalism. Capitalism is not the concept of trade. It is not the concept of a free market. It is not the concept of exchanging goods and services for money.
It is the concept of rent, and the value thereof which we call Capital. If I rent my tools to you to make something in exchange for the majority (or even minority) of the value of the good produced that is doing a capitalism. That is the classic example, but extend that out and it's still just capitalism.
"Investing" is just renting out your currency in exchange for a minority of the value produced by it.
When you then become a currency issuer^1^ and that currency becomes ultimately meaningless to you^2^ you're still participating in capitalism by using it, as you are still "investing" public funds into something in order to extract value.
Yes yes the federal reserve technically does this, blah blah, private institution that just so happens to print money whenever congress asks and cannot act on its own except to set interest rates for private entities printing money so it's essentially a public entity.
MMT is valid enough for how the US actually operates that I'm considering it real for this argument. It is a magic "make capital" button, making capital ultimately meaningless (hence the faith you mentioned).
We should audit them. Then we’ll know where the waste is!
(This is a joke. I know they have never passed an audit.)
Eh, yes. That is the point, no?
The bigger it is the better
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