The Briefing Room
General Category => Politics/Government => Topic started by: austingirl on December 03, 2018, 05:30:58 pm
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The punchline is that she’s taken an interesting piece in the far-left Nation about systematic accounting chicanery at DOD and distorted it so wildly that the story now comes off as underwhelming when you read it to fact-check her. The point of the Nation piece isn’t that Defense has spent $21 trillion, it’s that it’s used accounting tricks to move the equivalent of $21 trillion around on paper. Why? Because an inflated accounting of spending this year all but guarantees that spending won’t be cut next year...
I wonder if Ocasio-Cortez’s view of general federal spending is driven by the $32 trillion number for Medicare for All that’s constantly, and justifiably, being thrown in her face. That’s over 10 years, not one year, she’s always quick to remind her critics. “And surely,†a novice progressive politician might think, “if single-payer costs $32 trillion over 10 years, our damned bloated Defense budget that I’m constantly hearing about must cost at least $21 trillion, if not more.†She probably glanced at the figure in the Nation story and thought that it seemed perfectly plausible as a measure of actual defense spending. Maybe the happy outcome of this episode will be to drive home to her just how fantastically gigantic, even by Pentagon standards, $32 trillion over 10 years is.
https://hotair.com/archives/2018/12/03/ocasio-cortez-pay-two-thirds-medicare-21-trillion-spent-pentagon/
Keep talking you economic, accounting and mathematical genius.
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These people are why I keep a calculator handy. 333cleo