This Sucks
You know, I really do believe in a strong government, even if it is one that I don’t agree with. But stuff like this really makes me wonder if going a more libertarian route wouldn’t be that bad after all. Ugh. How do you lose 8 billion dollars?! Dude, this sucks. That could have covered rebuilding utilities in half the cities in Iraq! That could have covered rebuilding Fallujah! Right now they have $250,000 committed to Fallujah. That’s not even enough to fix the sewers which we destroyed.
*sigh*
It is not clear to me how a libertarian system would have made this not happen. Especially considering that the unaccounted-for money was from a pool which was not subjected to strong oversight: “U.S. taxpayer funds received close scrutiny from federal auditors and investigators. Iraqi money from oil revenues and assets seized from the regime of Saddam Hussein, however, were spent without controls to ensure accountability.“
OK, so I just reread this article, and now I’m really confused. That line you quote is the only place in the article where they imply that the money didn’t come from US tax payers. In fact I am not sure that the statement you make “[the money] was from a pool which was not subjected to strong oversight” is a logical conclusion from that article. I can’t tell if that quoted sentence is meant to imply that there are worse instances because they are completely unaudited, or if that only happened because it was unaudited.
In any case, if as I thought, the money did come from US taxpayers, not having any taxes would solve the problem of the money being wasted.
It was me being disgusted with government waste not a general statement of good solutions to the US’s (or Iraq’s) problems.
The libertarians wouldn’t have invaded Iraq in the first place.
And being subject to oversight and auditing doesn’t prevent money from being lost. The Pentagon is not alone in “losing” funds: for instance, HUD lost $59.6 billion in fiscal year 1999, according to an audit. (Here that loss is referred to as a budget adjusment.
Part of the problem the feds have with this is because we don’t really have a set budget: it gets altered too much. Another part of the problem is that there is so much money, a lot of turnover of personnel and a tremendous reliance on paper forms for many tasks, so finding where funds were used can be a very daunting task. Even I, skeptic and critic of government that I am, don’t think that they, say, took this money and blew it playing Texas Holdem in Vegas: most of it was probably properly used (as far as they’re concerned. As far as I’m concerned, HUD’s existence is improper, but that’s another story), they just can’t account for it.
Of course, there is out and out fraud sometimes. But the federal government has been a very poor bookkeeper for a long time, although I do think some of the auditing they’re trying to do is impossible under the circumstances they work under.