Originally posted by x0847Marine
The US government, I find hilarious...A study by the Defense Department's inspector general found:
A TRILLION US tax dollars vanished into thin air.
They paid $640 for a toilet seat.
56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units were lost by the US Army... meaning they have no idea where they are.
Even funnier, nobody will ever be held accountable while re-pubes + democraps will continue to spend billions drowning out any voices calling for and end to this poop.
Gotta be careful about real waste and urban myth. Much (not all but most) of what you hear is either malicious or just plain old stupidity ON THE REPORTERS PART whether it be a politician, reporter, the IG or GAO.
$640 was never paid for a "toilet seat", it's a myth. The item purchased was the molded fiberglass interior for a head in a P-3. Yes, part of it covered the toilet just like the interior of an airliner lavatory does but it was not a "toilet seat". These are the BS myths that some pin-head politician or uber investigative reporter comes up with so they can show how much smarter they are than anyone else just like the old saw about the $200 hammer, a similar piece of trash reporting and hype. The government purchased entire tool boxes for a set price, the contents were not individually priced. Someone in the government decided they needed to itemize the contents so they divided the total cost of the tool box by number of tools inside. Each item whether it was a $20 hammer or $1,000 pneumatic drill therefore "cost" $200 so while the government may have "overpaid" for the hammer the drill was a steal. As far as the "lost" airplanes, tanks, etc., that's pure nonsense. There is no single place within the services where you can go to find out where every single piece of equipment is, DOD is too large for that. Hell, I've gone up to the flight deck to man an F-14 and it wasn't there. I was shocked, shocked I tell you that we've "lost" a $35,000,000 fighter! It was still on the hangar deck, just hadn't been brought up on the elevator yet. All of these things belong to some commander who knows where it is, it's not lost, just someone's (probably a Pentagon bean counter) paperwork isn't up to date.
These "myths" become "common knowledge" through constant, ignorant repetion and the bad part of it is that attention gets diverted from the biggest source of waste which is political in nature. Congress backs a certain airplane over another...why? Because one plane has major components built in 25 states and the other plane is built in only 5.
