Let's Talk About The Money Again - Briefly

 Ol' Mitch and the Boys are up in arms because the Democrats are trying to pass a bill to spend three trillion dollars - over ten years - to convert America into a society with affordable and universal health care, affordable and ubiquitous child care, quality, affordable and accessible elder care, high quality pre-K education, high quality K-12 education, and accessible, affordable and world class quality post K-12 education, to mention some of the things that the Democrats want to provide to the people. 

They do that because they believe that with those things America will compete, prosper and prevail in the Twenty First Century and beyond.

Ol' Mitch and the Boys are agin it.

However

That same bunch - Ol' Mitch and the boys - are really high on spending money on "defense": they are perfectly fine with spending eight trillion dollars over that same ten years on eighteen billion dollar aircraft carriers that need to spend $400,000 to flush the toilets, to mention just one of the things eight trillion can buy these days.

Some additional random observations about the results of spending that eight trillion: the F35; it is a plane for the Air Force AND the Navy; neither service wants that plane.

But it's years behind schedule and billions over budget so it must be a good deal; the services will come to love it, I am sure.

There is no way to know who all the defense contractors are; no one has that information.

But, like termite tunnels in a house's foundation, their existence can be seen form the streams of money that flow out of the defense budget every year to - somewhere.

The Department can't be audited; nobody knows where the money goes, but we haven't been attacked by Russia so far, so it must be money well spent - so the story goes.

I think I have heard that even though there is no way to audit the Defense Department there are occasional attempts; those attempts, so far, have resulted in failure.

Ol' Mitch and the Boys think that eight trillion on Defense over the next ten years is probably not enough, but, lacking any audit information they are hard pressed to prove it.

But eight trillion on uncontrolled graft and waste looks real good to them.

Three and a half on human infrastructure is out of the question.

To learn more about what an unbelievably wastefully expensive shambles  our defense budget is listen to this podcast from "On Point" from WBUR in Boston.