[WarChortle]

I am speaking in generalities because I don't know your exact stance on everything.

The American military budget is so massively over-bloated its sickening. No only that, they made 35 Trillion dollars in adjustments in 2019 alone. The year before they made 30 Trillion dollars in adjustments.

In 2018 the pentagon failed its first ever independent audit, instead of releasing the report, they changed their own rules to hide the report under the guise of "national security".

I shudder to think how much money is being skimmed from the pentagon budget, but no one seems to care.

> Why is it such a negative thing for I, as a contributor, to look at the system critically and with reservations?

Its not, but I find it disturbing how, in general, even the smallest whiff of fraud from a social program, brings all sorts of regulations and cuts. But the Pentagon making 65 trillion dollars in adjustments to its budget in 2 years is meet with silence.

For me, I would rather every single person in this country go to bed with a full stomach, even if it meant some amount of fraud, then to let the pentagon piss away more money.

If people really cared about not wasting their tax dollars they would be outraged over the pentagon. Doing a proper audit of that would probably get back so much money any fraud in social programs would be statistically insignificant.

[creato]

35 trillion is almost double the entire GDP of the US, and almost 10x the entire federal budget. I don't know where you are getting that number.

[jazzyjackson]

Accounting adjustments, see https://taskandpurpose.com/news/pentagon-35-trillion/ (one of many sources)

“It means money that DoD moved from one part of the budget to another,” Clark explained to Task & Purpose. “So, like in your household budget: It would be like moving money from checking, to savings, to your 401K, to your credit card, and then back.”

However, $35 trillion is close to 50-times the size of the Pentagon's 2019 budget, so that means every dollar the Defense Department received from Congress was moved up to 50 times before it was actually spent, Clark said.

[tylerhou]

They're not saying that the US spends $35T on defense, they are saying that the budget is so complex that the aggregate value of internal transactions (i.e. budget allocation flowing down to sub-departments) is $35T. They use this complexity to claim (without evidence) that some money must be being skimmed.

Not a fan of the amount the US spends on defense, but I'm also not a fan of arguments that make claims without any proof.

[WarChortle]

> I'm also not a fan of arguments that make claims without any proof.

I'm with you but in this case the Pentagon hid the results of its first independent audit. There is no proof, but the fact they changed the rules to hide the results of the audit says all I need to know. If the pentagon wants to prove me wrong I'm all for it. Release the results and prove me wrong.

I won't hold my breath.

[BitwiseFool]

>"If people really cared about not wasting their tax dollars they would be outraged over the pentagon."

Personally, I am. And at large, just about any American will agree that we spend too much on the military industrial complex. The barriers to reducing military spending are different from the pressures put on politicians to manage social welfare programs.

[WarChortle]

> just about any American will agree that we spend too much on the military industrial complex

That's not my experience, Can't tell you the amount of people I've meet that have no problem with the military having a blank check.

[fmajid]

Money skimmed from the Pentagon budget is money not spent actively blowing up poor brown people abroad.