Filed under: American politics, economics, Uncategorized | Tags: economics, US Government
I saw this last night and decided it was too big, literally, to ignore.
The US Army currently reported that in FY 2015 it had $6,500,000,000,000 (that’s $6.5 trillion) in spending on an annual budget of $122,000,000,000 ($122 billion), or spending 54 times more than its budget. Worse, between 1998 and 2015, the Army and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) somehow racked up $21,000,000,000,000 in spendings. Here’s a link to the press release about Michigan State Professor (Mark Skidmore), who broke the news (although it had been mentioned by the government), here’s the article on it in Forbes. Here’s the documents. As noted in both articles, when Prof. Skidmore started probing these expenditures, documents on them, which had been publicly posted at the Office of Inspector General at the DoD, for some reason all the links started disappearing. It’s a good thing Skidmore had already copied the documents and is now posting them online. Oh, and this might potentially be why the DoD is undergoing its first agency-wide independent financial audit ever (press release). I haven’t looked at what HUD is doing, if anything. Continue reading
Filed under: alt-future, American politics, disasters, Legacy Systems | Tags: Continuity of Government, Raven Rock, US Government
I wish I could say that I was busy writing a new book, and that’s why I haven’t posted in a month, but really it’s more about life getting in the way of art, or something. One note is that between last April and this April, I wrote 21 responses to environmental documents for the California Native Plant Society and attended way more meetings than that. This isn’t due to the current administration in Washington, but rather more that we’re in (or just past) the height of the current business cycle, so every bad idea for a development has lumbered out of its crypt, demanding a new life. Or, less, poetically, projects are on their second or third go round after having been rejected the last time, because the land was available for cheap, and some developer suckered some investor into buying it on the promise that the land was so cheap they could afford to deal with all the legal hassles this time. And if it doesn’t work this time, there will be a next time as long as the land remains in private hands. But I’m getting side tracked.
I’ve also had some time to do a bit of reading, and I’d recommend Garret Graff’s Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself–While the Rest of Us Die. It’s a history of the US government’s attempts since Truman to figure out how to save the presidency from a nuclear war, secret undisclosed underground bunkers and all. It’s fun reading if you’re into this kind of thing, and I suspect it does play into modern politics in some ways that the book itself doesn’t go into. Continue reading
Putting the life back in science fiction 