The U.S. government spends $3.8 trillion a year. But where does the money go? Government accountants are not sure.
The government does not apply the same standards of accounting on itself that it applies to taxpayers. What the IRS will not tolerate, the GAO does.
The GAO is the accounting arm of the government. It’s a broken arm.
The GAO says that the Defense Department‘s accounts are so scrambled that they cannot be audited.
Anyone who thinks this is a mistake ought to run for Congress, because that’s the official view of Congress. Year after year, decade after decade, the books are cooked. No one cuts the Defense Department’s budget. The Washington Times reports: ” Throughout the rest of the government, there are “hundreds of billions” in unreconciled funds. These are the same conclusions the GAO has come to year-after-year for the past 15 years, and yet Uncle Sam still refuses to get his act together.”
That’s not a mistake. That’s unofficial policy.
In 2011, the government spent $80 million to upgrade computer systems. What were the results? Nobody can say.
The budget-busters are out of control.
Social Security and Medicare were among the worst offenders because their books relied on implausible projections of future revenue. GAO used classic understatement to describe the imminent collapse of FDR’s old-age Ponzi scheme. “Social Security is now in a negative cash-flow position,” the GAO report deadpanned. “The growing gap between revenues and spending that is built into the current structure of the budget leads to continued growth in debt held by the public as a share of GDP; this is not sustainable.”
The supposedly all-seeing government is actually blind as a bat — and without a bat’s radar system. We are told that central planners have both the wisdom and the data to run the Keynesian numbers. These Keynesian geniuses can keep the economy balanced. They will keep supply and demand balanced. There will be no unemployment. But these buffons can’t follow the money inside the U.S. government. How can they run the rest of the economy?
We are dealing with self-inflated, overpaid con men. They tell voters that they have what it takes to improve in the free market. They are in fact flying blind. Nowhere is this clearer than the cooked books of the U.S. government.