Now that I have been on both sides of this fence I wonder.
Who loses more a year, the defense contracts or Medicare/Medicaid.
After all those nice men on TV want me to think they are on my side, right?
So I looked up the 2008 Stats,
Now having sat through many a DCAA audit for my defense contractor, I know the number is a high one, Just for the CADE and Trilogy programs the government paid my company billions more than was originally contracted.
In fiscal year 2008, the Department of Defense (DOD) obligated over $380 billion to federal contractors, more than doubling the amount it obligated in fiscal year 2002. With hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars at stake, the government needs strong controls to provide reasonable assurance that contract funds are not being lost to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement.
According to Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute, experts estimate that "abuses of Medicaid (alone) eat up at least 10 percent of the program’s total cost nationwide -- a waste of $30 billion a year.
380 billion loss to Defense contractor waste, or 30 billion to M&M Waste. Does anyone else see this? Are the republican senators talking about cutting CACI off? Or DynCorp? Hell no!
Sticking with the FY 2008, the total budget was:
The President's budget for 2008 totals $2.9 trillion. Percentages in parentheses indicate percentage change compared to 2007.
And as an Aside:
The Iraq War and the War in Afghanistan are not included in the regular budget. Instead they are funded through special appropriations
The CBO now estimates the costs of the Iraq war, projected out through 2017, might top $1 trillion, plus an extra $705 billion in interest payments, and says the total cost of Iraq and Afghanistan combined could reach $2.4 trillion.