Failure of Representation: How Military Accounting Affects us at Home
“War is a racket” General Smedley Butler
Most voters aren’t happy with the U.S. government. The President’s approval rating is barely above 40%, and Congress is at an abysmal 13.8% approval rating. There is an overwhelming sentiment that the elected politicians don’t represent the interests and desires of the American people. That sentiment got Trump elected, that sentiment looks to be sweeping in a wave of congressional Democrats come November, and that sentiment is justified. Many of our elected officials appear to make no effort to protect or enact our interests. Nowhere is that more visible than the discrepancy between our military budget, the DoD’s failures in accounting, and the badly needed but neglected social programs like medicare for all and fully funded college education.
According to Time, most voters favor a cut in the military budget, and they favor a military budget of $497 billion dollars. That’s $142 billion dollars fewer than is allotted for in the recent spending package. This bloated budget is even more concerning when one takes in to account what voters actually support. A survey by The Economist found that 60% of Americans support Medicare for all and NBC found that 62% of Americans support free public college. Even more disheartening is the fact that even the Military has trouble accounting for its own spending. If the U.S. military were to simply reinvest all the money it lost track of since 1995 we’d be able to fully fund single payer, college for all, and have $19.55 trillion to spare. President Eisenhower warned us about the Military Industrial complex, but I doubt even he foresaw such a monumental failure.
Creative Accounting
The military is well aware of how embarrassing it’s accounting is. An investigation by Michigan State economics professor Mark Skidmore found $21 trillion dollars of missing military spending. A Forbes article co authored by Boston economics professor Mark Kotlikoff and Skidmore addressed this gross deception of the American People. Shortly the publication of the article the Office of the Inspector General removed the report that the analysis was based on. This public deception and failure of accounting is a violation of Article 1 of the Constitution.
The ends of all that spending may be even more concerning than the failure of accounting. The cost of the military intervention in Libya was, once again as per Forbes, at least $2 billion dollars a day. If the problems with military accounting are any indication that number is likely a low-ball.
Burn Down for What?
Previous to the intervention, Libya was the African nation with the highest average standard of living and a life expectancy longer than the Netherlands. Afterwords Libya was turned into an open air slave market and became a critical territory for ISIS in recruiting terrorists and acquiring weapons. This took a non-threat to America and turned it into a serious threat to the stability of an already war torn region.
Instead of creating a humanitarian crisis abroad we could have spent that money fixing a humanitarian crisis at home, the failure of the U.S. education system. Columbia University did a meta-analysis of U.S. deaths caused by poverty in the year 2000, and the conclusions were horrifying. The year 2000 had the second lowest poverty rate in U.S. history, and still, “245,000 deaths in the United States in the year 2000 were attributable to low levels of education.” Since 2000 the poverty rate has risen, schools across the nation have faced devastating budget cuts, and the price of education has skyrocketed. It’s doubtful those numbers improved.
The total cost of providing a free public college education to everyone in The U.S.A. is about $70 billion dollars, or 35 days of intervention in Libya. That price tag is about 1% of the Army’s missing $6.5 trillion in the year 2015 alone. Our legislators have been faced with the question of help save at least 245,000 American lives or turn a prosperous African nation into a slave/haven for terrorism. Those public officials chose to abandon the American people to inflict misery, enrich oil companies, and pay for the military industrial complex.
This problem is unlikely to improve under the current administration. Secretary of Education Betsy Devos actively supports cutting funding for public schools, and her brother is a founder of the infamously expensive and violent paramilitary organization Blackwater. Blackwater is infamous for acts like gunning down civilians in Iraq without provocation. The Washington Post reported that a 34 person Blackwater team costs more than $11,000,000 a year, about twice the cost of a similarly sized deployment of U.S. Troops.
The Price We Pay
The horrors don’t stop there. 45,000 Americans die each year from lack of health insurance. While the insurance death toll is substantially less than the 245,000 who died from lack of education, it’s still about 15 times as many deaths as we suffered during 9/11. According to politifact.com the cost of moving to a Canadian style health provision system (a system that has 0 deaths a year from lack of insurance) is $1.38 trillion dollars. That sounds like a high price but it is mitigated by two factors: First, the U.S. government already spends about $1.05 trillion a year on health care, which means the additional yearly cost would be $0.35 trillion more in federal spending; second, according to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services the total cost of American health care right now is $3.3 trillion, so if the government increased its health care spending by 33% the American people could save nearly $2 trillion dollars.
Not Too Thrilled
Our legislators and leaders could have spent $0.35 trillion dollars to save 45,000 American lives and then save the average American $5894 a year, or our legislators could protect health insurance companies and the military industrial complex. That $0.35 trillion is only 1.06% of the amount of money the government “lost track of.”
The gross ineptitude and greed of our public officials has not gone unnoticed by the American People. Politifact found that the average American has a higher opinion of root canals and gonorrhea than it does of congress. Perhaps politicians should have the decency not to lose $21 trillion in taxpayer dollars while hundreds of thousands of citizens die of neglect, or perhaps career politicians should be less surprised when they get beaten by a game show hosts who brag about sexually assaulting women.
Pentagon Image: – The Pentagon found on wikimedia commons via flickr https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_(building)#/media/File:The_Pentagon_January_2008.jpg