Wars since 2001 as part of the Federal U.S. debt?

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No2statism Posted: Sat, Apr 7 2012 1:26 PM

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Anyone have a guesstimate (percentage)?  Neoconservatives like to say that they're not more than 13.33% of the Federal debt to date, while a far left blogger (I want to say David Cay Johnston, who isn't any closer to being "fair and balanced" than Faux News is) said they were around $4.4Tn.  However, I'm not sure if he was adjusting the 2001-2010 monetary costs to 2011 inflation adjusted dollars.

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Clayton replied on Sat, Apr 7 2012 2:13 PM

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@No2: An important point to keep in mind is that we really don't know. Donald Rumsfeld announced the day before 9/11 that the Pentagon had lost track of $2.3 trillion - that's trillion with a T. The Federal budget is not really a budget because it doesn't account for all the revenue sources or all the expenses. A significant amount of money is simply off-the-books or intentionally misappropriated (to cover for so-called black ops, i.e. blatantly criminal operations). CIA certainly has significant revenues from illegal drug sales, for example - and I just assume on principle that they're bringing in revenue in the form of protection payments on every kind of international black market dealing.

The key point to keep in mind is that the entire modern mythos of war-making is built on the idea that we're so rich that we can have guns and butter. We can go to war and not feel the pinch back home. But the fact is that every dollar spent building and dropping bombs is a dollar that isn't building homes or manufacturing cars, etc. We would be much better off to simply pile the money into gigantic stacks and light it on fire or pay people to dig miles of ditches by hand in the desert and fill them back again - at least this way no one gets killed.

Clayton -

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No2statism replied on Sat, Apr 7 2012 5:14 PM

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Thanks Clayton.  Good points:)

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Clayton replied on Sat, Apr 7 2012 5:43 PM

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Here's a video that attempts to present the scale of the US military expenditures.

Clayton -

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Aristophanes replied on Sat, Apr 7 2012 6:28 PM

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@Clayton.

If you look at the DoD Black Budget over the last fifty years (today it is roughly 50 bn annually), you will see that 2.5 Trillion has been given to the DoD since 1952 for black operations.

The money was not missing, it was just Rumsfled playing politics with money that doesn't need to be tracked (it is BLACK BUDGET).  It is not DoD's responsibility to keep track of secret expenses for public record.  People always bring that up as if it is some smoking gun.  It is not.  It was merely political posturing for the media.

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Clayton replied on Sat, Apr 7 2012 7:07 PM

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@Aristophanes: That explanation doesn't pass the sniff test. The entire US defense budget in 1952 was around $50B so the black budget portion must have been much smaller. Furthermore, Rumsfeld was clear that these were funds that were supposed to be being tracked and which had been "lost track of" due to incompatible computer systems and accounting procedures between various DoD departments.

Clayton -

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Aristophanes replied on Sat, Apr 7 2012 7:32 PM

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I made a function a year or so ago based on exponential growth of the 50bn dollar black budget of today.  I'm not dumb.  I realize that in 1952 the budget wasn't 50bn alone for that It was probably only like 20 or 30 million.  But the budget has gotten bigger.

"Rumsfeld was clear that these were funds that were supposed to be being tracked and which had been "lost track of" due to incompatible computer systems and accounting procedures between various DoD departments."

Wasn't he also, like, super clear about WMDs in Iraq?

Or do you think that the DoD would even mention black budgets at a public conference?

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Clayton replied on Sat, Apr 7 2012 8:11 PM

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I think you're confused - this was the result of an internal Pentagon audit.

Clayton -