Just my opinion (but I did work in the defense industry from 1974 to 1998), but I just don’t believe the published ~ 800 billion defense spending numbers. A few presidents ago, the chairman of the joint chiefs publicly said that 7 trillion in military spending is unaccounted for.

Also, I admit to getting much of my information from professor Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, an economist.

I took an online economics class from Wharton business school, specifically on the economics of globalization. Fascinating stuff.

Anecdotal, but as a hobby for the last 20 years, I enjoy comparing the coverage of major news and economics stories in USA vs. other countries.

> 7 trillion in military spending is unaccounted for

If someone gave me $100, and I handled it without keeping track, that's $100 not accounted for. But we do know that I was given $100, and the money went somewhere we just don't know where. But it doesn't necessarily mean that this was shadow money outside of the larger picture budgets, people still know I was given $100. Its not like now there's somehow $200 spent because I was given $100 and I failed to account for $100.

So thinking about the $800B defense budget, if they fail to properly track $150B of that budget, that's another $150B added to that pile of unaccounted for money. But its not an extra $150B that got spent, its still a part of that $800B.

> A few presidents ago, the chairman of the joint chiefs publicly said that 7 trillion in military spending is unaccounted for.

You're likely referring to the fact that the pentagon can't pass an audit even though there have been requirements going back to the 90s. That's more about tracking where the money they spent is going as opposed to the total quantity of money they are spending though, i.e. the $800bn is "accurate" but some portion of it may have vanished due to bad accounting, corruption, waste, fraud, etc...

Having said that any accounting for an entity the size of the US government is non-trivial. The numbers I stated above are not the final numbers. Firstly because it's YTD but also because of the complexity in the accounting. We have decades of trend lines and a lot of public data on tax receipts, bond auctions, and the like to know that defense spending isn't drastically different than what is being reported though. If you have any analysis that concludes otherwise I would enjoy reading it.