How much is $21 Trillion?

Nobody seems to be talking about the fact that the Department of Defense can't account for $21 Trillion. The news came out last year in a study by Prof Mark Skidmore of Michigan State. The Pentagon doesn't deny it, but they're not doing anything to track it down. Forbes reported it last year, and Dave Lindorff wrote an article for The Nation, but The New York Times didn't think it was 'fit to print".

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How much is $21 Trillion? The biggest lawsuit in the history of the world was the 46-state settlement with American tobacco companies. It was about 1/80 as big. $21 Trillion is bigger than the entire US GDP. It's more money than the legitimate, appropriated spending of the US military for the entire history of our country, 1776 to 2018, at home and abroad, through two world wars Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, the War on Terror, and countless other wars. How can the Pentagon be missing more money than the total that has ever been budgeted to it?

$21 Trillion is a stack of $100 bills more than 50 miles high.

Are you an American taxpayer? Your share of $21 Trillion is $150,000. Is anyone talking about a lawsuit to recover this money?

Where can $21 be hiding? It stretches the imagination to try to think of projects on this scale. Does NASA have extensive bases on Mars and beyond? Are there huge underground cities based on technologies a century ahead of what you and I have? The trouble with hypotheses like this is that they imply employment of huge numbers of people. It would be such a large hunk of the economy that it would be hard to hide. Odds are that several people you know would be working on a project of this scale.

Has it gone to prop up the stock market? $21 Trillion is about what it would take to buy up all the stock of the 500 largest US corporations, the S&P 500. Has it gone into precious metals stockpiled for the 0.01%? All of the 190,000 tons of gold known to exist in the world is worth "only" $7 Trilion.

If this money was indeed spent by the US government over the past 18 years in any way, shape or form, it shatters the article of faith from economists that government spending is inflationary. Every "responsible" legislator, from either side of the aisle, tells us that we have to choose between spending cuts and higher taxes, that we cannot afford to educate our children the way we want to, or to build new hospitals, or to refurbish America's failing infrastructure, or to provide Meidcare for all, or to build high-speed rail lines and modern public transit systems. Not enough money, they tell us. $21 Trillion offers a chance to question their premise.

I don't have any answers to these questions. I'm just pointing out that the questions are worth asking. Pull gently and persistently on this thread and it will certainly lead you to the world's closeted power elite and offer a hint about what they're doing and what games they're playing with us.

There aren't any honest or innocent ways to hide $21 Trillion.