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Comment by hobbitstan | Hacker News Reader

$2.1 trillion dollars unaccounted for. This is clearly by design.

American taxpayers have a serious problem with the government. That's nothing new.

Do we think this "narrative" (not sure what else to call it, if we supposedly have facts to prove how broken it is) will change in our life time? Get better? Get worse? Stay the same?

Why does it matter who we vote for if the whole system is a sham?

Because we could vote out the the whole sham if we united one day. But the powers are always dividing us while giving us the illusion of choice which is their fabricated narrative. An independent could technically win and wipe out the whole system in a poof.

Wiping out the pentagon is not realistically possible. You can vote in whoever you want, they won’t be able to dismantle the DOD beauracracy

While any such system can be changed or dismantled by popular will, it certainly can't happen by voting. Look at how slavery was dismantled - it took decades of organizing to create any wide-spread negative sentiment against it to even begin to make it possible to have candidates who would oppose it.

Who do you imagine could suddenly unite the whole country behind them as presodent strongly enough that they would actually be able to dismantle something like the defense budget? Do you even know how much of the economy is currently financed by that, and would have to go through a painful re-org if that money would stop, or even if the way it was being received changes?

Slavery _could_ have been dismantled by voting, just look at other UK colonies. The reason war was required isn’t that voting wasn’t enough, it’s that there weren’t enough votes.

Weird how some people forget that the south loved having slaves

It's not the voting that would have done it - it's the organizations that worked hard to convince people to care. People aren't blank slates who decide their positions in front of the ballot. Politicians supporting an idea don't just appear because that idea exists.

That's my point - not that it took a war to end slavery in the South, but that it took decades for slavery to become unpopular in the North (and the other UK colonies). It didn't just happen over night, same as one candidate that is anti the military-industrial complex won't appear overnight and be able to dismantle it.

You can't "vote out" the apparatchiks who run state agencies like the pentagon. If voting was an actual threat to the system, they would have gotten rid of it a long time ago.

> American taxpayers have a serious problem with the government.

Perhaps, but every other department first passed its audit at least fourteen years ago. The defense department has failed all 5 of its audits. This is in the article. This shouldn't be an opportunity to bash HUD and the EPA.

> This shouldn't be an opportunity to bash HUD and the EPA.

Yes it should. They're all fundamentally similar. Housing and environmental policy is a wreck. Same with energy. Same with healthcare.

I mean isn’t this literally by design in that we have a black hole for a lot of the secret military projects?

all countries have that. and yes, by design.

I was under the impression that money for such projects was an all encompassing line item on the budget.

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