4/2/2007 8:46:00 AM How did we lose $12 billion in cash?
By BILL HORNE
Folks, how did we lose $12 billion in cold hard cash? We shipped $12 billion in cash, all nicely shrink wrapped and on skids, to Iraq and we lost it. We have no idea where it went. All of this $12 billion is in $100 bills. This totals to 363 tons of money.
It is my estimate that it would take 15 to 20 semitrailers to haul it away. So, it is obvious that there was more than one person involved in the theft. It would take a small army to move it and, of course, there is the problem of loading and unloading.
I cannot find a theft, in the past, as large as this one. In cold hard cash that is. We have had many larger thefts by corporate managers, but that was just a matter of transferring numbers from one computer to another.
And of course, there has been an enormous amount of money that has been spent and cannot be accounted for in Iraq, more than $9 billion, according to our government, that was paid to corporations. This money was paid to perform services that previous wartime armies performed themselves. It is called outsourcing or privatizing, I believe.
It doesn't seem that anyone is very concerned about this $12 billion loss. So, maybe it was part of a larger plan to lose it on purpose. Surely, though, there must be an investigation going on somewhere. I can't be the only American citizen that thinks losing 363 tons of $100 bills "without a trace" is a crime. Maybe we are just too embarrassed to do anything.
It is hard to stop talking about government and dollars once you get started.
In a recent letter to the editor, a local citizen stated something to the effect that printing money caused inflation. I am sure he meant that comment as an analogy. We don't print much money anymore. Currency, printed money if you will, is only about 4- to 5-percent of our total money. Printing more currency would accomplish nothing, unless of course, you intend to lose it in Iraq, because you and I wouldn't use it.
Money today is mostly zeros and ones on computers. We would be in trouble if somehow our financial computers became sick and lost all that information. This was the Y2K fear.
Twelve billion dollars is a lot of money when it is in cash, but when we look at how much we give large corporations in tax breaks and subsidies, it is just a drop in the bucket.
We give hundreds of billions to large corporations in an effort to entice them to locate in our communities. And, there is no good research that shows the taxpayers ever get their money back.
Furthermore, when we pay large companies and don't pay our small local businesses, we put our local companies at a severe disadvantage.
Let's look at what has happened since the World Trade Organization (WTO) became the all powerful supreme ruler of everything.
American companies first began outsourcing back office jobs to places like India. This is why when you call what you thought was an American company, you sometimes find it difficult to understand the broken English on the other end of the line.
The next step was for American companies to move their corporate headquarters off shore to avoid taxes. At this point, American companies were no longer American. Not only did this save money on taxes, but these companies could now sue the U.S. for trade restraints.
The WTO, even though it is all powerful and its laws supersede all its member countries' laws, did have a clause that stated that a company could not sue its own country. So, moving off shore and denouncing its mother country helped these companies in several ways. Now we hear the news that the company that feeds our troops in Iraq has moved its headquarters from Texas to the city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. This is the same country that has been accused of laundering money for terrorists. This is the same country that we became so upset about when it tried to buy our ports last year.
I know I sound skeptical and as Bill Bear would say, "too negative." I prefer to think that I am a realist. But, if someone can show me the positive side of our large corporations abandoning us, the U.S., for Middle East and communist, anti-Christian countries, I will admit I am too negative.
My wife and I attended a local Nation Rifle Association (NRA) banquet a couple of weeks ago. This is an organization that is about as pro-American as they come. We came home with two pocket knives made by different companies, but both made in China. We were also given some NRA cups made in China and a miniature American flag made in China.
You may shop in any big box you chose and 80-percent of their products are made in China.
First, we gave the Chinese President Bush's $1 trillion tax cut to build infrastructure, then we gave them our jobs, and then we gave them our manufacturing equipment, and now we are sending them the remains of our manufacturing buildings as scrap metal. China is swallowing so much of the world's scrap metal currently that some countries have passed laws disallowing further shipments.
I wonder what the Chinese workers think as they make American flags for us. I wonder how the Arab world thinks as one of our largest military companies relocates its headquarters to a rogue Arab country. I wonder how we could lose 363 tons of $100 dollar bills in enemy territory.
Maybe I wonder too much.
--Bill Horne is a professor of economics at Southern State Community College and a columnist for The Times-Gazette.
