“If only the taxpayers knew: The Pentagons Missing Money & The US Defense Budgets Real Annual Price Tag”

  “Each year, Congress advocates hundreds of billions of dollars for the US defense budget- but the real number exceeds $1 trillion” as stated by Hartung & Smithberg.  In recent days with the current Democratic Primary, voters are headed to the polls to determine who is fit to run the race to defeat the current President, Donald J. Trump. And with healthcare being one of the top priorities to citizens, it seems as if every week Medicare 4 All proponents like Bernie Sanders come up against the same question: “How are you going to pay for it?”. Why don’t we ask the same question in matters of War? Why don’t we ask the same of our elected Congressional officials? As stated in the article: “The Trump administration is asking for a near-record $750 billion for the Pentagon and related defense activities—an astonishing figure by any measure." Congress went on to award the Department of Defense $738 billion in regards to the Trump Administration request, despite the fact that it was $22 million more than given the previous year. Just think of the sheer size of that amount of money spent on defense. This budget is as stated in the article: one of the largest military budgets in American history, topping peak levels reached during the Korean and Vietnam wars. And yet we do not have local and nationally syndicated news anchors pressing Defense contractors and war mongering legislators on matters of the Defense budget and asking the railing question of: “How are you going to pay for it?”

 No, as citizens of the United States we often trust that our country is protected by our huge military machine and that the taxpayer funds that go into the Pentagon are safeguarded and handled responsibly. But after reading  Branko Marcetic’s op-ed “Dark Money at the Pentagon” the reality of fraud, missing money and a lack of accountability have loomed over DoD out in the open since a report in 2017 indicated that : “the Army had posted $6.5 trillion worth of unsupported accounting adjustments for 2015. The figure was fifty-four times the spending authorized by Congress. Since 1998, the Pentagon logged unsupported adjustments worth at least $21 trillion.” These unsupported journal voucher adjustments are basically a more complicated way of saying spending discrepancies lacking an explanation. $21 trillion of taxpayer’s money gone with no receipt or documentation with no explanation as to what the money was used for or how it was used. In response to the $21 trillion, Rafael DeGennaro, director of Audit the Pentagon states, “It’s more accurate to say that it’s not properly accounted for than that it’s ‘lost’ or ‘disappeared,’”.

 But even with this being an accounting issue rather than a fraud issue, it is still egregious and a mismanagement of funds. And yet Congress garners bipartisan support and still allows these defense budgets to increase at all-time highs. Democrats claim Donald Trump is corrupt and dangerous yet some of the same Democratic congressional representatives that voted to Impeach Trump are the same Democrats who voted to give his administration a blank check on Defense. I am not a supporter of Donald Trump; I am just making a point that I feel is important. Why do we hand over trillions of dollars to the Department of Defense, knowing that the Pentagon misuses and inaccurately accounts for this money? How is it that we ask so often how we are going to pay for healthcare in this country but not reflect and ask ourselves how we are paying for our current fraudulent defense budget system? “The debt and deficit each year is used to argue against social spending, this is why in America we can’t afford all sorts of things — a universal health care system, a more honest jobs program.” Says Lindsay Koshgarian, program director for the Institute for Policy Studies National Priorities Project. But how will we ever be able to improve quality of life here in the United States if we steadily allow the Defense budget to balloon? In Hartung & Smithbergers’ article: “America’s Defense budget is bigger than you think” they state that: “There are at least 10 separate pots of money dedicated to fighting wars, preparing for yet more wars, and dealing with the consequences of wars already fought. So the next time a president, a general, a secretary of defense, or a hawkish member of Congress insists that the US military is woefully underfunded, think twice.”

The base budget total: $554.1 billion, the war budget total: $173.8 billion, Nuclear budget: $24.8 billion, Defense -related activities budget:$9 billion, Veterans Affairs total: $216 billion, Homeland Security total: $69.2 billion, Internal Affairs total: $51 billion, Intelligence budget total: $80 billion, Defense share of National Debt Total:$156 billion. As tallied and stated in the article: “our final annual tally for war, preparations for war, and the impact of war comes to more than $1.25 trillion, more than double the Pentagon’s base budget.” Funding endless wars creates a cash cow for the military industrial complex. It is sickening to see news outlets, politicians and bad faith actors attack Medicare 4 all and other progressive plans that are being drafted to fix the broken parts of America. While turning a blind eye to the immoral profits of endless wars and ballooning Defense budgets. In order to truly re-prioritize the needs in this country then we must take a closer look at the current priorities we have. And maybe next time a President proposes a massive Defense budget then maybe we too should ask the Executive and Legislative branch: “How are you going to pay for it?”

SOURCES:  SOURCES: “Dark Money at the Pentagon By Branko Marceti, January 2018” and “America’s Defense Budget is Bigger Than You Think by William D. Hartung and Mandy Smithberger, May 7,2019” Jacobin Magazine