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Loose change.

Zyzzyvas

Student
Z
Joined
Jun 26, 2007
Messages
31
This topic may be in this section but ironically, it is no conspiracy theory. I am amazed that it hasn't been covered more in the media because it would appear to me to be a matter of huge concern - and I'm not even American. I refer to the fact that the current administration freely admits that it cannot account for trillions of dollars. A trillion is a one with twelve zeros after it. A million million. And the figure has not been pinned down at all - estimates range from the 2.2 trillion Donald Rumsfeld casually mentioned a few years ago, to figures of over 10 trillion I have read about more recently.

That's a bit more than loose change.....
 
Zyzzyvas said:
This topic may be in this section but ironically, it is no conspiracy theory. I am amazed that it hasn't been covered more in the media because it would appear to me to be a matter of huge concern - and I'm not even American. I refer to the fact that the current administration freely admits that it cannot account for trillions of dollars. A trillion is a one with twelve zeros after it. A million million. And the figure has not been pinned down at all - estimates range from the 2.2 trillion Donald Rumsfeld casually mentioned a few years ago, to figures of over 10 trillion I have read about more recently.

That's a bit more than loose change.....
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What are you talking about? Is this the 9/11 truth junk about the Pentagon? What a bunch of junk. You need to research better before you fall for junk about 9/11, and what does it mean? Why bring up something without facts to support it.
 
This topic has already been covered here. The Pentagon never stated that it could not account for the money - it stated that it could not track it. It's a bit of a hair-split but, IMHO, an important one. From the DOD transcript:

The technology revolution has transformed organizations across the private sector, but not ours, not fully, not yet. We are, as they say, tangled in our anchor chain. Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions. We cannot share information from floor to floor in this building because it's stored on dozens of technological systems that are inaccessible or incompatible.
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For comparison, DOD was allocated $436.5 billion USD by Congress for FY2007. I assume that the trillion-dollar estimate is also adjusted for inflation.

Of course, way too much government spending across all sectors is lost to fraud and mismanagement

Please cite your sources, so as not to breach rule 4:
http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=430
Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: chillzero
 
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strathmeyer said:
Citation, please.
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155794689cda0128a4.jpg
 
Zyzzyvas said:
This topic may be in this section but ironically, it is no conspiracy theory. I am amazed that it hasn't been covered more in the media because it would appear to me to be a matter of huge concern - and I'm not even American. I refer to the fact that the current administration freely admits that it cannot account for trillions of dollars. A trillion is a one with twelve zeros after it. A million million. And the figure has not been pinned down at all - estimates range from the 2.2 trillion Donald Rumsfeld casually mentioned a few years ago, to figures of over 10 trillion I have read about more recently.

That's a bit more than loose change.....
Click to expand...

Rumsfeld was basically lobbying for an increased budget for the accounting department. He did not literally mean that $2.3 trillion had been stolen somehow, just that the antiquated accounting systems could not locate it. The number is historical, so we could be talking about unaccounted for defense expenditures going back to the Civil War.

Rumsfeld was trying to get more bucks for the Defense Department in the face of some tough opposition. Obviously he did not know about the attack the next day after which opposition to increasing the defense budget collapsed like the towers.
 
Sincere apologies, I wasn't aware that the topic had been discussed. Though I was aware that had it been discussed it would be quickly pointed out. Thanks for your help.

I love this place. :)
 
Another thing to point out is that this is not expenditure that has simply vanished into thin air.

The point being made is that, while specific departments and projects will be allocated funds, the Pentagon has no way of tracking what specific things that department's budget is spent on.

For example, let's say $1 million is allocated to a given office. In a year they spend $60,000 of that on stationary. Of that $60,000, they spend $25,000 on paper. Of that $25,000, $4,000 is spent on A4 Glossy Photo Paper.

The Pentagon certainly knows the office was allocated $1 million, and spent it all. They might even know how much was spent on stationary. But they lack the means to centrally track how much was spent on A4 Glossy Photo Paper.

Of course it's possible the office actually only spent $100 on A4 Glossy Photo Paper, and the ebil "Black Department" spent the other $3900 for development of their FEMA Death Camp prototype. But it's pretty unlikely.

More likely the office spent $3800 on A4 Glossy Photo Paper, a couple of supply clerks spent another $100 on expensive pens that he kept for themselves, and another $100 was spent replacing the stick-on note pads that the receptionist stole.

-Gumboot
 
The first reports about the $2.3 trillion appeared in a report published at the end of February 2000:

Pentagon's finances in disarray

By JOHN M. DONNELLY The Associated Press 03/03/00 5:44 PM Eastern

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The military's money managers last year made almost $7 trillion in adjustments to their financial ledgers in an attempt to make them add up, the Pentagon's inspector general said in a report released Friday.

The Pentagon could not show receipts for $2.3 trillion of those changes, and half a trillion dollars of it was just corrections of mistakes made in earlier adjustments.

Each adjustment represents a Defense Department accountant's attempt to correct a discrepancy. The military has hundreds of computer systems to run accounts as diverse as health care, payroll and inventory. But they are not integrated, don't produce numbers up to accounting standards and fail to keep running totals of what's coming in and what's going out, Pentagon and congressional officials said.
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And so any connection to Bush and Rumsfeld is a little, well, tenuous.

Please cite your sources for copyrighted material:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4196/is_20000304/ai_n10594216
Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: chillzero
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Zyzzyvas said:
This topic may be in this section but ironically, it is no conspiracy theory. I am amazed that it hasn't been covered more in the media because it would appear to me to be a matter of huge concern - and I'm not even American. I refer to the fact that the current administration freely admits that it cannot account for trillions of dollars. A trillion is a one with twelve zeros after it. A million million. And the figure has not been pinned down at all - estimates range from the 2.2 trillion Donald Rumsfeld casually mentioned a few years ago, to figures of over 10 trillion I have read about more recently.

That's a bit more than loose change.....
Click to expand...

Please look at the quote, that MikeW has posted above...in particular look at the date....months before the REPs took power. So really, we should blame Clinton et al...right? lol

MikeW said:
The first reports about the $2.3 trillion appeared in a report published at the end of February 2000:



And so any connection to Bush and Rumsfeld is a little, well, tenuous.

Please cite your sources for copyrighted material:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4196/is_20000304/ai_n10594216
Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: chillzero
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TAM:)
 
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