> Thus it's easy to see the article is some mix of lying, ignorance, miscounting, multiple counting, or other nonsense
This reminds me of an economics joke.
A professor and a student are walking across campus. The student points to the ground and says, "Look! a $20 bill!" Without looking, the professor says, "Nonsense! If there were, someone would have picked it up."
> Care to explain their math while tying it down to actual budget numbers?
Since you don't seem to sully your assumptions with facts, no, I don't care to. You can stop reading here and just keep on being right all the time.
If anyone reading along is confused, here's some copy-paste from the article that could have saved the parent poster time and mockery:
Among the laundering tactics the Pentagon uses: So-called “one-year money”—funds that Congress intends to be spent in a single fiscal year—gets shifted into a pool of five-year money. This maneuver exploits the fact that federal law does not require the return of unspent “five-year money” during that five-year allocation period.
The phony numbers are referred to inside the Pentagon as “plugs,” as in plugging a hole, said current and former officials. “Nippering,” a reference to a sharp-nosed tool used to snip off bits of wire or metal, is Pentagon slang for shifting money from its congressionally authorized purpose to a different purpose. Such nippering can be repeated multiple times “until the funds become virtually untraceable,” says one Pentagon-budgeting veteran who insisted on anonymity in order to keep his job as a lobbyist at the Pentagon."
[...] In other words, there were no ledger entries or receipts to back up how that $6.5 trillion supposedly was spent. Indeed, more than 16,000 records that might reveal either the source or the destination of some of that $6.5 trillion had been “removed,” the inspector general’s office reported.
Again, this implies that Army spent 6.5 trillion, and I quote "there were no ledger entries or receipts to back up how that $6.5 trillion supposedly was spent".
Army has received far less than that in total money in their entire history, which is very easy to check.
So which is incorrect? The article? Or every other place you can check historical US federal budgets?
>no, I don't care to.
I suspected as much. It's trivial to check this number is nonsense.
This reminds me of an economics joke.
A professor and a student are walking across campus. The student points to the ground and says, "Look! a $20 bill!" Without looking, the professor says, "Nonsense! If there were, someone would have picked it up."
> Care to explain their math while tying it down to actual budget numbers?
Since you don't seem to sully your assumptions with facts, no, I don't care to. You can stop reading here and just keep on being right all the time.
If anyone reading along is confused, here's some copy-paste from the article that could have saved the parent poster time and mockery:
Among the laundering tactics the Pentagon uses: So-called “one-year money”—funds that Congress intends to be spent in a single fiscal year—gets shifted into a pool of five-year money. This maneuver exploits the fact that federal law does not require the return of unspent “five-year money” during that five-year allocation period.
The phony numbers are referred to inside the Pentagon as “plugs,” as in plugging a hole, said current and former officials. “Nippering,” a reference to a sharp-nosed tool used to snip off bits of wire or metal, is Pentagon slang for shifting money from its congressionally authorized purpose to a different purpose. Such nippering can be repeated multiple times “until the funds become virtually untraceable,” says one Pentagon-budgeting veteran who insisted on anonymity in order to keep his job as a lobbyist at the Pentagon."
[...] In other words, there were no ledger entries or receipts to back up how that $6.5 trillion supposedly was spent. Indeed, more than 16,000 records that might reveal either the source or the destination of some of that $6.5 trillion had been “removed,” the inspector general’s office reported.