Talk-Polywell.org

Given the immense spending budget for national defense, this seems counter intuitive. Are the armed services just that bad at budgeting money? Are screw ups like the F35 the norm? I mean it's ~%600 billion a year, why the hell does it still not work? Do they really need a trillion dollars? Why? How come Russia can spend ~%67billion a year and still compete with us?! It seems to me, it's not just the gov't that needs a complete overhaul at this point.

While I"m railing about problems. Are we seriously going to repeal all education laws without proper and adequate replacements? Are we honestly trying to lower our populations average educational level? What's the deal here?!

Well we have basically been at some form of war or conflict since the 1990s. As put earlier we've rob Peter to pay Paul and we brought a rethink what Paul had so he's broke too. And trying going to maintain this level of commitment you need billions more. The average American person seems to forget that we are at war. It's a limited conflict, casualties are light, and doesn't touch her home base but she is at war in the Mideast/near East. We basically used up all our spare parts and everything that we have we pretty much wore out. There's only two solutions this problem. One is to get out of Dodge and rebuild and option b is to throw more money at it and try to rebuild.I think this was the military-industrial complex Eisenhower was trying to warn us about

ScottL wrote:Are the armed services just that bad at budgeting money?

Look up "cost plus accounting". The government purchaser takes on the risk of cost overruns, removing incentive for the contractor to keep costs in line. There are also extensive costs associated with doing the accounting, and various methods to game it.

Cost Plus, and the habit of following a policy of "you can't have money for that, its not in the budget" for every month of the year except September, in which case the 'policy' is "we have X$ left in the budget, make sure to spend ALL of it, or we won't get that unspent money in next years budget".

hanelyp wrote:

ScottL wrote:Are the armed services just that bad at budgeting money?

Look up "cost plus accounting". The government purchaser takes on the risk of cost overruns, removing incentive for the contractor to keep costs in line. There are also extensive costs associated with doing the accounting, and various methods to game it.

I'm aware of the practice for contractors, but it got this way through mismanagement. You give them an inch, they'll always take a mile. Apparently we have budgetary boneheads handling our contracting and accounting.

Or they are complicit. (Ref. Fat Leonard, NUWC, and other cases...)