I'm old enough to remember the $2 trillion Pentagon accounting error announced by Rumsfeld the day before 9/11. Didn't hear much about that in the intervening years
Not very satisfying debunking, $2.3 trillion being untrackable implies many billions being stolen. Don't really think it had much to do with 9/11, just a huge fucking grift on the taxpayers
I wonder if that's inflation adjusted or not, because I can easily imagine that after factoring in inflation the depreciated value of a 30 year old weapon system is about the same as the new price 30 years ago.
I'm not an accountant, and I don't know how the Pentagon approaches depreciation schedules, but most examples I've seen in general descriptions have annualized rates much higher than inflation. Also, some methods have a final period over which the the depreciation is 100% of the remaining value, which can't be offset by any amount of inflation.
I thought this was the idea all along... the announcements were all using as new sticker prices +r&d for the first manufacturing run on 20 year old hardware, it was a feature not a bug.
Cynically this "accounting error" is either an excuse to send more hardware to achive the same absolute $$ cost, or a method of communicating that the "cost" to the taxpayer was much (much much) lower than it really was.
Readit News
Dead Comment
Hopefully this is the explanation.
Cynically this "accounting error" is either an excuse to send more hardware to achive the same absolute $$ cost, or a method of communicating that the "cost" to the taxpayer was much (much much) lower than it really was.