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Twenty-one trillion dollars. The Pentagon’s own numbers show that it can’t account for $21 trillion. Yes, I mean trillion with a “T.” And this could change everything. But I’ll get back to that in a moment. 

There are certain things the human mind is not meant to do. Our complex brains cannot view the world in infrared, cannot spell words backward during orgasm and cannot really grasp numbers over a few thousand. A few thousand, we can feel and conceptualize. We’ve all been in stadiums with several thousand people. We have an idea of what that looks like (and how sticky the floor gets).

But when we get into the millions, we lose it. It becomes a fog of nonsense. Visualizing it feels like trying to hug a memory. We may know what $1 million can buy (and we may want that thing), but you probably don’t know how tall a stack of a million $1 bills is. You probably don’t know how long it takes a minimum-wage employee to make $1 million.

That’s why trying to understand—truly understand—that the Pentagon spent 21 trillion unaccounted-for dollars between 1998 and 2015 washes over us like your mother telling you that your third cousin you met twice is getting divorced. It seems vaguely upsetting, but you forget about it 15 seconds later because … what else is there to do?

Twenty-one trillion.

But let’s get back to the beginning. A couple of years ago, Mark Skidmore, an economics professor, heard Catherine Austin Fitts, former assistant secretary in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, say that the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General had found $6.5 trillion worth of unaccounted-for spending in 2015. Skidmore, being an economics professor, thought something like, “She means $6.5 billion. Not trillion. Because trillion would mean the Pentagon couldn’t account for more money than the gross domestic product of the whole United Kingdom. But still, $6.5 billion of unaccounted-for money is a crazy amount.”

So he went and looked at the inspector general’s report, and he found something interesting: It was trillion! It was fucking $6.5 trillion in 2015 of unaccounted-for spending! And I’m sorry for the cursing, but the word “trillion” is legally obligated to be prefaced with “fucking.” It is indeed way more than the U.K.’s GDP.

Let’s stop and take a second to conceive how much $21 trillion is (which you can’t because our brains short-circuit, but we’ll try anyway).

1. The amount of money supposedly in the stock market is $30 trillion.

2. The GDP of the United States is $18.6 trillion.

3. Picture a stack of money. Now imagine that that stack of dollars is all $1,000 bills. Each bill says “$1,000” on it. How high do you imagine that stack of dollars would be if it were $1 trillion. It would be 63 miles high.

4. Imagine you make $40,000 a year. How long would it take you to make $1 trillion? Well, don’t sign up for this task, because it would take you 25 million years (which sounds like a long time, but I hear that the last 10 million really fly by because you already know your way around the office, where the coffee machine is, etc.).

If my mental arithmetic is right that’s like a trillion dollars a year, so (very) roughly 6% of the US economy has been being siphoned off by the pentagon per year over the last two decades unaccountably. And that’s in addition to the exorbitant overengorged budget they’ve had. USAmerica Delenda Fucking Est

It’s… it’s worse than that. It’s so much worse.

The “exorbitant overengorged budget they’ve had?”

That’s TWO FUCKING PERCENT of what was spent on them in 2015.

And your math – at least for that year – is… it’s so much worse. In 2015, the last year we have data for, the US Army’s unconstitutional spending accounted for 8% of the global economy.

Eight. Percent.

Eight cents out of every dollar in the world.

As for the US economy alone? The black hole was over 30% of it. Given that the total taxes assessed by the IRS were about 8%, or less than a third of the Army budget…

…you should be very scared right now for the implications and fallout of this.

Holy fucking shit.

I never, ever, ever want to hear another Republican politician talking about how the government can’t just spend whatever they want on programs and how the money has to come from somewhere, unless the very next thing out of their mouth is “and that’s why we’re shrinking military spending all the way down to its apportioned budget”.

Where’s this money coming from, anyway? If it really is more than can be accounted for from US tax revenue, clearly some of it must be coming from abroad or from private entities.

Where’s that whole Trump speech, again, about how we can’t let ourselves become indebted to China and other countries? Because it sounds like this most ~patriotic~ of institutions is doing its damnedest to do exactly that: indebt us to foreign entities for the sake of having the biggest stick to wave around (on paper).

Fuck this noise. I’ve said it before, but now I can say it with even more conviction: if this country is ever going to be better than it is now, military spending must be reined in.

Breaking down the 25M years to make 1 trillion dollars in an attempt to make it more real (it probably won’t completely work but might get everyone closer to visualizing the enormity of this).

40K a year means 400K in 10 years. In 20 years, double that, 800K. Say you work 40 years? Double that again, you have made 1.6M. Woot! You’re a millionaire! Or would be if you hadn’t spent any of it, which, yeah, obviously not.

So okay, 1.6M in 40 years, a career, sounds like millions aren’t that big a deal, right? And billions is just the next step, and then it’s trillions, and that’s where your brains trick you. These next steps are each 1000 times more than the one before, but your brains don’t like to think of it that way so it just goes ‘yep, millions first, then billions which is more but you know, it’s just the next one, then trillions which is even more because it’s the one after that’. You’re literally thinking of this the same way you’re thinking of small, medium or large size fries.

So let’s keep looking at how this accumulates. After 50 years (who can retire these days??), you have made 50 x 40K = 2M. After 100 years, you’re up to twice that, so 4M. Let’s start using zeros to better illustrate and start building a table.

100 years, let’s call it one lifetime even though it’s generous: 4,000,000

200 years or two lifetimes: 8,000,000

3 lifetimes (300 years): 16,000,000. Note that if we go back 300 years, it brings us to 1718. This is 58 years earlier than July 4th 1776, dear American friends. It’s a while back. 300 years is a while ago. But hey, we’re up to like, 16 millions! That’s almost a billion, and then it’s just a hop and a skip for a trillion!

No, that’s your brain hating math again. Let’s double it again.

6 lifetimes (600 years): 32,000,000. Funny note: 16,000,000 was 1.6 thousandth of a percent of 1 trillion. So we’re now, after 600 years, 3.2 thousandth of a percent of the way there. This is the amount of time since 1418, aka decades before Europe started conquering America.

Quick table to pick things up:

1,000 years (the time since the year 1018) – 40,000,000 or 0.004% of a trillion

2000 years (Jesus of Nazareth was, by most calculations, still alive this long ago, assuming he ever was): 80,000,000 or 0.008% of a trillion 

3000 years: 120,000,000 and we finally have more than one hundredth percent of a trillion (0.012% to be exact)

6000 years: 240,000,000 or 0.024%. This was before the apparition of the first writing systems.

Yeah, let’s get to 1%, heh? We need between 41 and 42 times more. Let’s go with 42 times 6000 years or 252,000 years. To situate you, 252,000 years ago, we were still 50,000 years away from the apparition of the first homo sapiens.

So, if we make 40K a year for 50,000 years longer than homo sapiens have been around, we will have 10,080,000,000. That is 10 billions and 80 millions. You might recognize that now seemingly insignificant 80 millions as how much money we make in 2000 years at 40K a year.

That’s 1.008% of one trillion, aka less than 1/20th of 21 trillions, aka less than 5% of 21 trillions. And keep in mind that I multiplied by 42 once I got to 6000 years. One hundred years at a time, I’d need 60 lines in a table to get to 6000 years, and if I kept doing one line per 100 years, I’d need 2,520 lines to reach 252,000 years or, at 30 lines per page, 84 pages.

To get to 1% of less than 5% of the 21 trillion dollars.

What does it  take to get to 10% of 1 trillion dollars? About ten times more as you might guess. 2,500,000 years to be exact. How much time is that? Your brain is putting blinders on again, so just picture all of civilization since homo sapiens first appeared, and then have a big disaster that wiped it out right back to nothing. And then it happened again, right up to this point in another 200,000 years, and boom, gone again. And this happened 10 times. 2 million years have passed or ten times humanity’s entire history. Had another 2.5 times that and you’re there. In prehistorical timelines, that’s when the first homo habilis started showing up, in the paleolithic era. 

So, 12.5 times the entire history of humanity since homo sapiens, at 40K a year, we’re at 10% of 1 trillion. 

To get to 20%, we need 5,000,000 years. Here’s a wikipedia description: 
“
First tree sloths and hippopotami, diversification of grazing herbivores like zebras and elephants, large carnivorous mammals like lionsand the genus Canis, burrowing rodents, kangaroos, birds, and small carnivores, vultures increase in size, decrease in the number of perissodactyl mammals. Extinction of nimravid carnivores.”

To actually get to 100% of one trillion, aka less than 5% of 21 trillions, at 40K a year, we need, as stated above, 25 millions years. That would be 125 times as long as the entire history of humanity since homo sapiens first appeared.

Then do this again 21 times. And NOW you have 21 trillions. 

I hope you like your desk. Might want to update your computer a few times during that time.

The Pentagon Can’t Account for $21 Trillion (That’s Not a Typo)