Let's take some guesses...how much of our defense budget is pork/corruption?

[BreweryYardRat]

I'm going to say 50-75%. For fuck's sake, we've got a $532 billion budget allotted for this, and that's not even counting the other stuff that goes toward defense-related projects, or the extra allocations the Republicans are always requesting. Robert Higgs guesses that the other funding puts the budget closer to a trillion. Given the current problems we're having in Iraq, there's no way all-or even most!-of that is going where it's supposed to.

Russia and China (our only potential rivals for military power) put together have a much larger tax base than we do, and they only spend about $122 billion-together! That's not even counting any corruption that may be present in their budgets.

We need to audit the damn defense budget, line by line. And we need to do it now. We could probably fund a complete universal health care system and increase our education budget a lot by cutting out the corruption. We wouldn't need to raise taxes.

Sources: Wikipedia and http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1941

[soothsayer]

1. 75%

[qwlauren35]

2. I wanted to be optimistic...

And say 30%. I guess I forgot who's in office.

But if you think for one moment, that it's going to get uncovered, please think again. Too easy to spin. "It's for the soldiers."

[BreweryYardRat]

3. No, it's not too easy to spin.

Say "It's vital for the soldiers that we don't investigate," and I'll say, "So's what I'm proposing. It's vitally important that we not get gouged out of money that should be going to keep them safe. And if I'm right about the level of corruption, we can raise our troops' level of safety by properly using some of the money that's currently getting flushed down the proverbial toilet."

[jwirr]

4. One of the early decisions that *ss made was to tell the DOD that

they did not have to do an audit. The repug congress at the time let it slide. There is not better way to enable thieves than to let them know ahead of time that no one will be doing an audit.

[BreweryYardRat]

6. Whoa, seriously?

If you've got a convenient link, please pass it on. Otherwise, I'll do the research myself. It doesn't surprise me, but I'd love to have the article/transcript at my fingertips.

[jwirr]

20. I think some of them finished an audit but there were many departments

in the military who could not finish it because they did not know where the money went. He was just starting his dear war and that is when he told them it was acceptable to not do an audit. I remember this because it made me mad at the time. It was the Pentagon that had large sums of money they did not know where it was because some of their appropriations goes into secret slush funds. I do not know where the link to this can be found.

[leftofthedial]

5. 82.79%

is flushed down the toilet of crony capitalism

[BreweryYardRat]

7. How'd you derive that particular figure?

Very specific. I'd like to know what your data is.

[leftofthedial]

9. 42.39% of all statistics

are made up on the spot.

the reality is every dime spent on weapons systems is wasted.

Our military is four or five times the size it needs to be to defend the US.

Some large percentage of the budget (which is larger than, what? The next 20 military budgets in the world combined?) should just be eliminated. We have no need to exert military power elsewhere in the world as we currently do.

[BreweryYardRat]

11. I was hoping that wasn't where you got the statistic.

I wouldn't say every dime, but you're definitely right about our military being oversized. It should be about double the size necessary to defend the country. That would give us capability to keep ourselves safe while still sending troops to help in places like Darfur that really need it.

And it's the next 14 mil. budgets combined.

[leftofthedial]

12. and that's just the part of the budget they make public

[LSK]

14. there is no exact figure, large portions of funds are classified for CIA and such

You will NEVER see an exact figure.

[leveymg]

8. Very little that goes to the troops. It's the contractors who need to be jailed.

The companies that produce equipment need some looking into -- but a tank is a tank, even at $5 million each, at least the troops get something.

The newly privatized areas of information technology, inteligence analysis, logistics, supply, oil field operations, and other support services are where the real graft and abuse is.

Every contractor dollar needs to be gone over by auditors, and then the pennies weighed.

[DemReadingDU]

21. I heard 40 cents of every dollar goes to contractors

There was a segment about Blackwater on NPR Fresh Air Monday 3/19/07.
Jeremy Scahill talks about his book Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

Very enlightening. Scahill said that .40 cents of every dollar being spent for the so-called war on terror, goes to private contractors!

Another interesting tidbit. During the aftermath of Katrina, Blackwater was paying something like $350 for people to work. Then billing the govenment something like $950 per day per man! Where did this $600 go???


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8992128

[nadinbrzezinski]

10. Actually a bit of it goes into black projects

such as the B1B, which was off the books for all of its development and that ran into the trillions

[BreweryYardRat]

13. kick

:kick:

Let's talk about this some more, shall we?

[geardaddy]

15. 90%

now that Halliburton is the recipient of most of the money.

[yardwork]

16. U.S. soldiers reported playing football with stacks of money dumped in Iraq

Remember the missing billions? Blackwater? The Pentagon's Black Budget that is secret from even Congress?

Try to imagine how much has been wasted in this war.

[dkofos]

17. It's about time the American people know that we spend more on

defense as the rest of the world.

We should be able to defend this country for less than $150 billion.

And when I say this country I don't mean having our troops all over the world.

[JackRiddler]

18. Please add the interest payments on "the debt"

...most of which can be traced to past military expenditures. All of which does NOTHING except perpetually enrich the owners of T-Bills ...

...not that the Chinese (and Japanese) don't have it coming, after delivering each year of their surplus production to US consumers in exchange for air-dollars, and then obediently sticking these back into financing the US deficit, so that we can engage in more useless wars to raise the prices the Chinese (and Japanese) pay for energy and raw materials, before they produce next year's production for delivery to the US in exchange for air-dollars, ad infinitum... Poor saps, you really have to see that they're trapped in this even worse than the average debt-overladen US consumer...

Anyway, add the interest payments.

Add 2/3 of the Energy Dept., the Veterans Admin, and 1/2 of NASA (conservative estimate).

Subtract from the "consolidated budget" the automatic expenditures financed by separate taxes - i.e., Social Security and Medicare.

What's left? Something like 80 percent of the regular federal budget is for war.

Meanwhile, bogus macro-economists will tell you, hell, the "defense" budget is a mere 3-4% of GDP, that doesn't matter.

As though the (low) weight of hormones or the nervous system compared to the rest of the body dictates their importance in determining a person's behavior.

The US economy is a war economy. Wired for war, run by war.

The only things left ultimately backing the dollar are commodity pricing in dollars, which is enforced at this point by the presumption of US military might: The Megaton standard.

[mdmc]

19. 69%

imho

[PerfectSage]

22. The US military gets the worst bang for it's military buck.

The US military doesn't have functioning accounting system that can be audited, so it's a perfect black hole for corruption for the MIC.

<snip>There is abundant evidence that neither the Department of Defense in general, nor the individual services, can either manage or account for the funds they have already been given.

In fact the situation is so appalling that, according to the Controller General, over 3,000 different financial systems are in use, audits have been impossible for years, and the most recent Pentagon proposal gives 2016 as the nearest achievable date for an audit.

2016! Do not laugh (unless hysterically from shock); and please understand that I really did mean 2016, roughly the year that war with China is supposed to break out according to Pentagon planning. That date is neither a joke nor a misprint.

2016 is a neat date for the Department of Defense because by that time virtually all of those in charge when the problems were created will have retired or died, or otherwise vanished into the woodwork, so there will be absolutely no one around in the Pentagon, except the janitor – who will probably be a robot by then - to take the blame. <snip>

http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/oreilly_national_cake.htm