Military overspending

Hey, I wonder who many more troops we could have in the force if we eliminated some of the BILLIONS of dollars of fraud and waste?

Waste at the Pentagon is nothing new. But recent revelations suggest that it may be reaching historic levels. 

The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction has uncovered scandal after scandal involving U.S. aid to that country, including the creation of private villas for a small number of personnel working for a Pentagon economic development initiative and a series of costly facilities that were never or barely used. An analysis by ProPublica puts the price tag for wasteful and misguided expenditures in Afghanistan at $17 billion, a figure that is higher than the GDP of 80 nations.

I'm one of the first people who will jump up and defend military spending, but that means I have to be one of the first to jump up and demand that the money being spend in the military gets spent properly.  I've been in several positions where I had financial liability for several projects, and if there were a discrepancy, the Army would hunt me down and take it out of my paycheck.  So I made damn sure I knew where every single penny went.  There was no fraud.  There were no discrepancies.  I think that if we started hitting the people committing the fraud in their pocketbook (as well as some jail time) that fraud would end rather quickly.

But that would mean that when people commit fraud, they get punished.  And since the VA can't even stick to the punishment for the people who jacked $400k from them, I don't see that happening any time soon.

Although Kimberly Graves and Diana Rubens are excellent reasons why the VA needs to be dismantled and turned over to a private company.