The big con that everybody voted for.........

[Pilate]

You know, the average idiot (though I must admit that most of our liberal posters definitely aren't average) would know this story to be absolutely false simply by the math.

If we look at their chart, it would be reasonable to estimate that the DoD budget for the 17 years listed is about $500 billion/year, or in sum, $8.5 trillion in total - which just happens to be the amount in the "headline"

That means, the OP posits that every dollar spent on defense is unaccounted for. Not a single paycheck, not a single bullet, not a single gallon of gas, not a single airplane, ship, or tank is accounted for.

Forgive me if I snicker.

The article never actually stated at what point the waste started, the fact is the numbers presented in that chart were merely representative of spending during those given years. Even if the waste was only $1,000,000,000,000 that would still be enough to give everyone in this country about $3,000.

Quit backpedaling .... the article says "$8.5 trillion unaccounted for"

Pretty sure that's what it meant - $8.5 trillion is unaccounted for.

What a ridiculous piece of puffery.

They claim that because some audit was not conducted, every dollar over twenty years has been lost

And goes on to provide examples and testimonies suggesting that there is fraud and negligence going on in the DoD. Since when is right wing propaganda pushing for less money to be pumped into the military industrial complex ?

I read some of those stupid stories like the one about destroying $16 billion in ammunition

Gullibility all around

Right because government organizations can do no wrong.

 

[rightwinger]

The article never actually stated at what point the waste started, the fact is the numbers presented in that chart were merely representative of spending during those given years. Even if the waste was only $1,000,000,000,000 that would still be enough to give everyone in this country about $3,000.

Quit backpedaling .... the article says "$8.5 trillion unaccounted for"

Pretty sure that's what it meant - $8.5 trillion is unaccounted for.

What a ridiculous piece of puffery.

They claim that because some audit was not conducted, every dollar over twenty years has been lost

And goes on to provide examples and testimonies suggesting that there is fraud and negligence going on in the DoD. Since when is right wing propaganda pushing for less money to be pumped into the military industrial complex ?

I read some of those stupid stories like the one about destroying $16 billion in ammunition

Gullibility all around

Right because government organizations can do no wrong.

Problem with these stupid propaganda stories is when writing about government waste, you can put millions, billions or trillions in the headlines and find morons will believe you

Just like losing $8.5 trillion is ridiculous, $16 billion worth of ammunition is a ridiculous number

 

[Pilate]

Quit backpedaling .... the article says "$8.5 trillion unaccounted for"

Pretty sure that's what it meant - $8.5 trillion is unaccounted for.

What a ridiculous piece of puffery.

They claim that because some audit was not conducted, every dollar over twenty years has been lost

And goes on to provide examples and testimonies suggesting that there is fraud and negligence going on in the DoD. Since when is right wing propaganda pushing for less money to be pumped into the military industrial complex ?

I read some of those stupid stories like the one about destroying $16 billion in ammunition

Gullibility all around

Right because government organizations can do no wrong.

Problem with these stupid propaganda stories is when writing about government waste, you can put millions, billions or trillions in the headlines and find morons will believe you

Just like losing $8.5 trillion is ridiculous, $16 billion worth of ammunition is a ridiculous number

So have you any statistics or evidence to the contrary or are you just going to keep pushing this "no it can't be because I said so and if you don't listen to me then you're gullible stuff?" Last chance before I'm done to put up a well laid out argument with some logic, reason, stats, anything.

"20 to 40 million people couldn't have starved during the great Chinese famine, that's just too many!"

 

[rightwinger]

They claim that because some audit was not conducted, every dollar over twenty years has been lost

And goes on to provide examples and testimonies suggesting that there is fraud and negligence going on in the DoD. Since when is right wing propaganda pushing for less money to be pumped into the military industrial complex ?

I read some of those stupid stories like the one about destroying $16 billion in ammunition

Gullibility all around

Right because government organizations can do no wrong.

Problem with these stupid propaganda stories is when writing about government waste, you can put millions, billions or trillions in the headlines and find morons will believe you

Just like losing $8.5 trillion is ridiculous, $16 billion worth of ammunition is a ridiculous number

So have you any statistics or evidence to the contrary or are you just going to keep pushing this "no it can't be because I said so and if you don't listen to me then you're gullible stuff?" Last chance before I'm done to put up a well laid out argument with some logic, reason, stats, anything.

"20 to 40 million people couldn't have starved during the great Chinese famine, that's just too many!"

It can't be because they do not even have $8.5 trillion

 

[Pilate]

And goes on to provide examples and testimonies suggesting that there is fraud and negligence going on in the DoD. Since when is right wing propaganda pushing for less money to be pumped into the military industrial complex ?

I read some of those stupid stories like the one about destroying $16 billion in ammunition

Gullibility all around

Right because government organizations can do no wrong.

Problem with these stupid propaganda stories is when writing about government waste, you can put millions, billions or trillions in the headlines and find morons will believe you

Just like losing $8.5 trillion is ridiculous, $16 billion worth of ammunition is a ridiculous number

So have you any statistics or evidence to the contrary or are you just going to keep pushing this "no it can't be because I said so and if you don't listen to me then you're gullible stuff?" Last chance before I'm done to put up a well laid out argument with some logic, reason, stats, anything.

"20 to 40 million people couldn't have starved during the great Chinese famine, that's just too many!"

It can't be because they do not even have $8.5 trillion

Not all at once, no. But that's skewing things via clever wording.

 

[presonorek]

The U.S. military is good at fighting wars, but

Oh yeah? Which war have we won since 1941?

I can only think of one. Operation Desert Storm was a success. We chased Iraqi forces out of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. That operation took 47 days. I guess you can call that a war.

Bay of Pigs Invasion - Failure
Korean War - Failure
Vietnam War - Failure
Desert Storm - Sucess
Somolia - Failure
Kosovo - Failure
Afghanistan - Failure
Iraqi - Failure

Why are we considered a super power again? Does anybody get it?

 

[Spare_change]

The U.S. military is good at fighting wars, but

Oh yeah? Which war have we won since 1941?

I can only think of one. Operation Desert Storm was a success. We chased Iraqi forces out of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. That operation took 47 days. I guess you can call that a war.

Bay of Pigs Invasion - Failure
Korean War - Failure
Vietnam War - Failure
Desert Storm - Sucess
Somolia - Failure
Kosovo - Failure
Afghanistan - Failure
Iraqi - Failure

Why are we considered a super power again? Does anybody get it?

Let me guess ... history class was right after lunch, and you slept thru it every day, huh?

 

[yiostheoy]

The army isn't even all that good at fighting wars anymore. Someone needs to be held accountable.

The US Army did great in Iraq both times. They were using Petraeus' new insurgency manual.

 

[Pilate]

The army isn't even all that good at fighting wars anymore. Someone needs to be held accountable.

The US Army did great in Iraq both times. They were using Petraeus' new insurgency manual.

If they did great then once might have been enough. The fact is that we quit in Korea to save face, we handicapped ourselves out of cowardice in Vietnam, our squabbles in South America were just us venting, taking out Saddam worked...unfortunately, and our attempts at counter-insurgency have failed miserably.

 

[Spare_change]

The army isn't even all that good at fighting wars anymore. Someone needs to be held accountable.

The US Army did great in Iraq both times. They were using Petraeus' new insurgency manual.

If they did great then once might have been enough. The fact is that we quit in Korea to save face, we handicapped ourselves out of cowardice in Vietnam, our squabbles in South America were just us venting, taking out Saddam worked...unfortunately, and our attempts at counter-insurgency have failed miserably.

lol .... and the sky is pink, grass is orange, and unicorns gallop among the rainbows.

Let me guess ... the reality fairy missed your house, right?

 

[hangover]

Total bullshit

The Defense Department only has a budget of slightly over $600 billion a year

How can $8.5 trillion be unaccounted for?

^^^^Thick as a brick.
.......Since 1996 x $600 billion= over $12 trillion.
Take a reading comprehension class....or at least read the link provided.
Try this one.....
Defense Spending U.S.- Annual

 

[hangover]

With $8.5 Trillion Unaccounted for, Why Should Congress Increase the Defense Budget?

The U.S. military is good at fighting wars, but it sucks at managing money. Partly because of its convoluted bookkeeping systems, $8.5 trillion—yes, trillion—taxpayer dollars doled out by Congress since 1996 has never been accounted for.

That was also the first year that Congress passed a law requiring the Defense Department to be audited, which it has failed to do. In 2009, Congress passed another law requiring the DOD to be audit-ready by 2017. After spending—no wasting—billions on failed accounting software, the department is likely to miss that deadline, too.

Related: How the Pentagon Cooks the Books to Hide Massive Waste

So how does the military handle their books for the U.S. Treasury department? They cheat.

A scathing investigative report by Reuters in November 2013 described how an accountant at DOD in Cleveland would face the same monthly problem: Missing numbers, wrong numbers -- numbers with no explanation of where they came from or what they were for. To rectify the problem, the accountant was instructed to “plug” in false numbers in the DOD’s books.

How can an agency known for superior strategic planning on the battlefield be so incompetent on the home front? Is it arrogance? Sloppiness? Or simply a misplaced disregard for what their lack of discipline is costing the country.

As Reuters reported, a 14-year supply or 15,000 "vehicular control arms" of the military's Humvees were in stock as of November 2008. Yet, from 2010 through 2012, the agency bought 7,437 more of them -- at prices considerably higher than it paid for the thousands sitting on its shelves.

More recently, we have sadly reported just a few of the mounting accounting problems at the Pentagon:

• 
  
  
  • Pentagon Spends $1 Billion Destroying $16 Billion of Ammo. DOD purchased $16 billion worth of ammunition that it didn’t actually need, according to a Government Accountability Office investigation that found much of the ammo became “obsolete, unusable or their use is banned by international treaty.”
  • $80 Million “Iron Man” Suit for Soldiers That Might Not Work. The DOD is pouring millions into a wearable weapon it calls the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (TALOS) otherwise known as the “Iron Man” suit. It has a budget so far of $80 million in order to create a suit of armor that soldiers can wear while also being able to carry hundreds of pounds of gear Some scientists are already skeptical and say soldiers would never be able to move around in the heavy armor—let alone carry anything else.
  • $300 Million a Year Unaccounted for in Afghanistan. In the latestexample of lax oversight, a blistering new report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reveals the Pentagon isn’t keeping sufficient tabs on the $300 million in tax dollars each year that are supposed to help fund the payroll of the Afghan National Police (ANP).
  • U.S. Weapons Worth $500 Million Vanish in Yemen. Pentagon officials cannot track the whereabouts of $500 million worth of military equipment the U.S. donated to Yemen since 2007 – raising alarms that the hardware may have ended up with al-Qaeda or Iranian-backed rebels.
  • $1 Billion Paid for Loose Bolts and Damaged Aircraft. It’s bad enough that federal contractors hired to perform routine maintenance work on Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) airplanes dodged their work hours and shirked important safety requirements. It’s even worse that they overcharged the federal governmenthundreds of millions of dollars for their “work” – and agency officials didn’t notice any of it.
  • $700 Million for Afghan Gem Cutters. The Taskforce for Business and Stability Operations, formed in 2010, was supposed to reduce unemployment and fostering economic growth in Afghanistan. But management issues and lax oversight are hampering its effectiveness--leaving millions of tax dollars vulnerable to waste.
  • Pentagon Didn’t Report $145 Million in Improper Payments. The Defense Department’s Inspector General estimated that had these claims been included in DoD’s report, the actual amount of improper payments would be closer to about $213 million, or $145 million higher than DoD’s estimate.
  • Pentagon Scraps 16 Planes Worth $500 Million for Mere $32K. After spending nearly half a billion dollars on 20 planes to outfit the Afghan Air Force, the Defense Department turned around and scrapped 16 of the aircraft for 6 cents on the pound—just $32,000, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has learned.
  • $900 Million More in Outrageous Military Spending. In the latest blow to the program, the Government Accountability Office released a scathing review ofnewly built ships that just joined the fleet—ships that together cost nearly $900 million more than originally estimated.

What should Congress do? Continue to blithely increase the defense budget when the department can’t handle money? Call in Ernst and Young to do it for them? Or simply tell them they won’t get another red cent until they figure out how to add and subtract.

At a time when the country is facing entitlement cuts and desperately trying to not just repair but invest in new state of the art infrastructure, shouldn’t the agency with the largest federal budget justify what it spends and why? At the very least, if DOD doesn’t pass an audit, it should be penalized—just like you and me.

With $8.5 Trillion Unaccounted for, Why Should Congress Increase the Defense Budget?

If you can read this, then there is no need for your entire post to be made from oversized text. If you can't read this, then you're too fucking blind to be bothering with a computer anyway.

Yo moron, that's the size that was in the link. When I put the rest of the link on, it put it as the same size. Try dealing with the issue instead of being a shit for brains.

 

[hangover]

With $8.5 Trillion Unaccounted for, Why Should Congress Increase the Defense Budget?

So now you think big government is a bad thing?

Figured that out all by yourself?

 

[SwimExpert]

With $8.5 Trillion Unaccounted for, Why Should Congress Increase the Defense Budget?

The U.S. military is good at fighting wars, but it sucks at managing money. Partly because of its convoluted bookkeeping systems, $8.5 trillion—yes, trillion—taxpayer dollars doled out by Congress since 1996 has never been accounted for.

That was also the first year that Congress passed a law requiring the Defense Department to be audited, which it has failed to do. In 2009, Congress passed another law requiring the DOD to be audit-ready by 2017. After spending—no wasting—billions on failed accounting software, the department is likely to miss that deadline, too.

Related: How the Pentagon Cooks the Books to Hide Massive Waste

So how does the military handle their books for the U.S. Treasury department? They cheat.

A scathing investigative report by Reuters in November 2013 described how an accountant at DOD in Cleveland would face the same monthly problem: Missing numbers, wrong numbers -- numbers with no explanation of where they came from or what they were for. To rectify the problem, the accountant was instructed to “plug” in false numbers in the DOD’s books.

How can an agency known for superior strategic planning on the battlefield be so incompetent on the home front? Is it arrogance? Sloppiness? Or simply a misplaced disregard for what their lack of discipline is costing the country.

As Reuters reported, a 14-year supply or 15,000 "vehicular control arms" of the military's Humvees were in stock as of November 2008. Yet, from 2010 through 2012, the agency bought 7,437 more of them -- at prices considerably higher than it paid for the thousands sitting on its shelves.

More recently, we have sadly reported just a few of the mounting accounting problems at the Pentagon:

• 
  
  
  • Pentagon Spends $1 Billion Destroying $16 Billion of Ammo. DOD purchased $16 billion worth of ammunition that it didn’t actually need, according to a Government Accountability Office investigation that found much of the ammo became “obsolete, unusable or their use is banned by international treaty.”
  • $80 Million “Iron Man” Suit for Soldiers That Might Not Work. The DOD is pouring millions into a wearable weapon it calls the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (TALOS) otherwise known as the “Iron Man” suit. It has a budget so far of $80 million in order to create a suit of armor that soldiers can wear while also being able to carry hundreds of pounds of gear Some scientists are already skeptical and say soldiers would never be able to move around in the heavy armor—let alone carry anything else.
  • $300 Million a Year Unaccounted for in Afghanistan. In the latestexample of lax oversight, a blistering new report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reveals the Pentagon isn’t keeping sufficient tabs on the $300 million in tax dollars each year that are supposed to help fund the payroll of the Afghan National Police (ANP).
  • U.S. Weapons Worth $500 Million Vanish in Yemen. Pentagon officials cannot track the whereabouts of $500 million worth of military equipment the U.S. donated to Yemen since 2007 – raising alarms that the hardware may have ended up with al-Qaeda or Iranian-backed rebels.
  • $1 Billion Paid for Loose Bolts and Damaged Aircraft. It’s bad enough that federal contractors hired to perform routine maintenance work on Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) airplanes dodged their work hours and shirked important safety requirements. It’s even worse that they overcharged the federal governmenthundreds of millions of dollars for their “work” – and agency officials didn’t notice any of it.
  • $700 Million for Afghan Gem Cutters. The Taskforce for Business and Stability Operations, formed in 2010, was supposed to reduce unemployment and fostering economic growth in Afghanistan. But management issues and lax oversight are hampering its effectiveness--leaving millions of tax dollars vulnerable to waste.
  • Pentagon Didn’t Report $145 Million in Improper Payments. The Defense Department’s Inspector General estimated that had these claims been included in DoD’s report, the actual amount of improper payments would be closer to about $213 million, or $145 million higher than DoD’s estimate.
  • Pentagon Scraps 16 Planes Worth $500 Million for Mere $32K. After spending nearly half a billion dollars on 20 planes to outfit the Afghan Air Force, the Defense Department turned around and scrapped 16 of the aircraft for 6 cents on the pound—just $32,000, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has learned.
  • $900 Million More in Outrageous Military Spending. In the latest blow to the program, the Government Accountability Office released a scathing review ofnewly built ships that just joined the fleet—ships that together cost nearly $900 million more than originally estimated.

What should Congress do? Continue to blithely increase the defense budget when the department can’t handle money? Call in Ernst and Young to do it for them? Or simply tell them they won’t get another red cent until they figure out how to add and subtract.

At a time when the country is facing entitlement cuts and desperately trying to not just repair but invest in new state of the art infrastructure, shouldn’t the agency with the largest federal budget justify what it spends and why? At the very least, if DOD doesn’t pass an audit, it should be penalized—just like you and me.

With $8.5 Trillion Unaccounted for, Why Should Congress Increase the Defense Budget?

If you can read this, then there is no need for your entire post to be made from oversized text. If you can't read this, then you're too fucking blind to be bothering with a computer anyway.

Yo moron, that's the size that was in the link. When I put the rest of the link on, it put it as the same size. Try dealing with the issue instead of being a shit for brains.

Do you not know how the fundamentals of markup work? Maybe not. Maybe you're just shit for brains.

 

[hangover]

The U.S. military is good at fighting wars, but

Oh yeah? Which war have we won since 1941?

I can only think of one. Operation Desert Storm was a success. We chased Iraqi forces out of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. That operation took 47 days. I guess you can call that a war.

Bay of Pigs Invasion - Failure
Korean War - Failure
Vietnam War - Failure
Desert Storm - Sucess
Somolia - Failure
Kosovo - Failure
Afghanistan - Failure
Iraqi - Failure

Why are we considered a super power again? Does anybody get it?

Here's a clue....Desert Storm started the Iraq war....still there. You call that success. ....or as you spell it, sucess.

 

[rightwinger]

Total bullshit

The Defense Department only has a budget of slightly over $600 billion a year

How can $8.5 trillion be unaccounted for?

^^^^Thick as a brick.
.......Since 1996 x $600 billion= over $12 trillion.
Take a reading comprehension class....or at least read the link provided.
Try this one.....
Defense Spending U.S.- Annual

So they have "lost" $8.5 trillion out of $12 trillion

Were you this gullible when you were young too?

 

[presonorek]

Let me guess ... history class was right after lunch, and you slept thru it every day, huh?

Yes. Set me straight right now.

 

[presonorek]

The U.S. military is good at fighting wars, but

Oh yeah? Which war have we won since 1941?

I can only think of one. Operation Desert Storm was a success. We chased Iraqi forces out of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. That operation took 47 days. I guess you can call that a war.

Bay of Pigs Invasion - Failure
Korean War - Failure
Vietnam War - Failure
Desert Storm - Sucess
Somolia - Failure
Kosovo - Failure
Afghanistan - Failure
Iraqi - Failure

Why are we considered a super power again? Does anybody get it?

Here's a clue....Desert Storm started the Iraq war....still there. You call that success. ....or as you spell it, sucess.

Iraqi troops left Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. That was the goal of the operation.

 

[presonorek]

Democracies can't win wars. We the people are too squeamish to watch five American troops die. They want the war to stop and they want it to stop now. Under those circumstances you can't win a war. The political structure requires the elected officials to submit to the people.

Here is a song that little kids sang at school during World War 2:

Whistle while you work.
Hitler is a jerk.
Mussolini is a meany
and the Japs are worse.

Pop Quiz: What would happen if we taught these types of biggoted tunes to our children today? American doesn't have the capacity to work together as a team to defeat the enemy. We cry over 4 dead diplomats in Benganzi. Imagine if there would have been 5. 5 is not even close to the 405,399 troops that died in World War 2.

 

[SwimExpert]

Democracies can't win wars. We the people are too squeamish to watch five American troops die. They want the war to stop and they want it to stop now. Under those circumstances you can't win a war. The political structure requires the elected officials to submit to the people.

Here is a song that little kids sang at school during World War 2:

Whistle while you work.
Hitler is a jerk.
Mussolini is a meany
and the Japs are worse.

Pop Quiz: What would happen if we taught these types of biggoted tunes to our children today? American doesn't have the capacity to work together as a team to defeat the enemy. We cry over 4 dead diplomats in Benganzi. Imagine if there would have been 5. 5 is not even close to the 405,399 troops that died in World War 2.

I'm just curious.....why do yo have a faggot for your avatar? Also, if democracies can't win wars, how do you explain all the wars that you already admitted we've won?