256 grand
So a co-worker was talking to me about something with governments wasting money and I want to say it was on gun control or something like that, but I can’t remember. I then mentioned to the coworker that the amount involved, several hundred million, was nothing. I then proceeded to tell them about this little nugget I’d heard about and backed it up by actually finding legit backing to it and here it is.
The most
poignant thing from the article was this:
"According to some estimates
we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," Rumsfeld admitted. $2.3 trillion — that's $8,000 for every man,
woman and child in America. To understand how the Pentagon can lose track of
trillions, consider the case of one military accountant who tried to find out
what happened to a mere $300 million.
"We know it's gone. But we don't know what they spent it on,"
said Jim Minnery, Defense Finance and Accounting Service.
So here I
had my coworker saying…”woah ya several hundred million is nothing.”
When you hear 2.3 trillion dollars just gone though you can’t really quantify that. When it is broken down though to how much that translates into for every-single-person in the United States then it is easier to see how much it is. We did rough math, i.e. how many people were in our families and our coworker’s families. The total was 32. Multiply that by 8 grand and voila you get 256 grand. That is a lot of money just…”gone” for my little pod of coworkers and our families.
You may think, eh no big deal. Nobody came to my bank account and took 8 grand without my permission and “lost” it. Well actually you’d be right. The money never was in your account in the first place. It was, graciously, taken right off the top. Before you even got your paycheck via…taxes. You overpaid 8 grand. My wife and I overpaid by 16 grand. Just my immediate family, which includes my parents, my wife and I, brothers, sisters, and their kids we overpaid…$136,000. Measured in hard human labor that is the equivalent of 13,600 days of hard human labor or 37.26 years of hard human labor just…gone. That is approximately the total cost of the college degrees and future schooling that all my siblings and myself paid and will pay just…gone. That is approximately two, completely paid off, rental cash flow positive, equivalently priced homes like my brother just sold in the last year just…gone.
So…….Thanks government. Thanks criminals. Thanks pentagon.
To end on a positive and realistic note. How do you stop stuff like this from happening? You can’t. You can only change yourself. Think about what you can do to avoid this happening again and you’ll find yourself coming to some very interesting conclusions that will change most everything you think about and believe. Trust me J
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