TD₿: The Invisible Cost of War in the Age of Quantitative Easing by Alex Gladstein
TL;DR Through unscrupulous monetary policy, U.S. government officials are able to fund endless wars while masking them from the American public.
Hey Bitcoiners,
Yesterday, the Senate passed a bipartisan $858 billion defense-policy bill that allows for the military to purchase new weapons, increases pay for service members, and ends the Pentagon’s vaccine mandate for members of the military.
As of 2021, the United States of America spends more money on its military than the next 9 countries combined.
Personally, I’m all for protecting our borders and having proper defenses in place in case of a foreign attack. But what I am not ok with is the fact that the military seems to burn through money like it’s nothing with zero accountability, and that war has been a constant for nearly my entire life.
This new defense bill comes just as the Pentagon failed its FIFTH straight audit!
Policy Analyst Jennifer Knox writes,
“In 1990, Congress passed a law directing all federal agencies to produce regular, audited financial statements. More than thirty years later, the Department of Defense is the only agency that has never passed a single audit.”
In the most recent audit, only seven out of the 27 entities that make up the Department of Defense received “unmodified opinions”— which means auditors found their financial statements to comply with generally accepted accounting standards. This means that 20 of the entities representing ~60% of the department’s $7 trillion in assets, failed the audit.
The truth is, the U.S. Department of Defense continuously wastes American tax dollars through a combination of fraud, mismanagement, and wasteful spending.
It reminds me of a now-famous moment in 2001 when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that the Department of Defense could not account for $2.3 trillion.
This federal agency has failed to use taxpayer funds properly and can’t even manage to pass an audit, and yet the money continues to roll in. Defense spending is set to make up for more than 10 percent of the U.S. federal budget and nearly half of all discretionary spending. Why?
It all comes down to the money. When money can be printed out of thin air, the military can be funded no matter how wasteful it is, and endless wars can be fought without any monetary constraint.
In this article, Alex Gladstein makes the argument that, in the past, expensive wars were funded by raising taxes and through war bonds, but nowadays, wars are funded by ultra-accommodative monetary policy without the publics’ consent and at great cost to the average citizen. (03/02/2022)
By moving to a sound money standard like Bitcoin, in theory, endless wars like the ones we see today would not be possible because governments would not be able to be printed at no cost to fund them. This could lead to a world with less war, more peace, and less wasteful government spending.
Tick tock next block,
Sam Callahan
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Quote of the Day
“We live in an age of credit card wars. Near-zero interest rates are *essential* to enable borrowing to pay for extended military operations abroad that citizens in a democracy would otherwise reject if they had to finance them via taxation or war bonds.” - Alex Gladstein, Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation
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