I'm Right Again Dot
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A New Commentary Each Wednesday June 4, 2014
Money
My father once told me that money exists because
banks need it to keep score and someone concluded that you and I aren't
supposed to have any.
60 Minutes, the top CBS news show, has once again taken to repeating earlier documentaries. One of the repeated stories this week had to do with the most expensive weapons system in the history of the World: the F35 fighter aircraft.
The first time I saw the program, the cost for this "state of the art" flying machine was mind-numbing. I gathered after a second viewing, that if Lockheed Martin doesn't soon work out all of the bugs for which it is liable for having created, the firm may not survive to build the 2,443 units on order from our armed services.
The cost overrun has boosted the expense to we taxpayers to build each one to spiral to $137-million, so we're talking about $335-billion in the next 10 years. By watching the costs escalate, we can easily conclude that we're probably talking about $400-billion or more of our tax money. Spread out over 10 years, that's a $40-billion annual line in our Defense Budget. But what the heck, all we need to do is just print more money. Right?
Next: No one has announced any sort of rough estimate it is going to cost us to keep the 9,800 troops in Afghanistan - for training Afghani troops and police.
Another cheap thrill soon to hit the 24-hour news cycle: the Justice Department's own Office of Profession Responsibility has found out that hundreds of federal prosecutors and other of the department's employees have violated laws, rules or ethical standards in the past decade. Out of 650 infractions, more than 400 deal with intentional, reckless misconduct, such as purposely misleading courts and withholding evidence that could have helped defendants. My question: what's it going to cost to prosecute the prosecutors?
Forgive me for taking your mind off of the weather for a moment.
-Phil Richardson, Observer and Questioner
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