Money down the drain

I saw this story about the Pentagon misplacing or not being able to account for $8.7 billion  and had to jump on it.  It’s not news if you’ve been reading Miscellany101; we first wrote about this penchant of the Defense Department to mismanage funds…I still think that’s fraud, in February ’09 and claimed the amount was far more than the 8.7 billion dollars being reported today but closer to 10 billion, and underscored it with this quote

Though Defense has long been notorious for waste, recent government reports suggest the Pentagon’s money management woes have reached astronomical proportions. A study by the Defense Department’s inspector general found that the Pentagon couldn’t properly account for more than a trillion dollars in monies spent. A GAO report found Defense inventory systems so lax that the U.S. Army lost track of 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units. And before the Iraq war, when military leaders were scrambling to find enough chemical and biological warfare suits to protect U.S. troops, the department was caught selling these suits as surplus on the Internet “for pennies on the dollar,” a GAO official said.

The Iraq war was a windfall for everyone but the tax payer who saw the revenue generated by their taxes squandered by people who pushed upon the nation a needless war, to the detriment of millions of jobless and homeless Americans.  One trillion dollars lost, and that’s what we know about, for nation building?  Someone should ask the homeowner who just lost their house, or the person unemployed from a company that couldn’t afford to keep them whether the loss of the national revenue to fund the Iraq war was worth their circumstance today.  Regrettably the story making the rounds today by AP about the Pentagon not being able to account for “X” billions of dollars isn’t news……it’s pathetic!