DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is embarrassing.

Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted misleadingly about a report on Pentagon financial practices. (Susan Walsh/AP)

By Salvador Rizzo
December 4 at 3:00 AM
“$21 TRILLION of Pentagon financial transactions ‘could not be traced, documented, or explained.’ $21T in Pentagon accounting errors. Medicare for All costs ~$32T. That means 66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon.”

— Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), in a tweet, Dec. 2, 2018

The Defense Department is awash with money. So much money that neither the staff nor 1,200 auditors could make sense of where it all went. (The Pentagon recently failed its first big audit in history.)

Enter Ocasio-Cortez. She supports expanding Medicare to people under 65, what’s known as single-payer or Medicare-for-all. But the big question is how to pay for all that health care. According to an estimate from the Urban Institute, the price tag on Sen. Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-all proposal would be $32 trillion over 10 years.

Maybe the Pentagon has a few trillion dollars lying around somewhere, as Ocasio-Cortez implied? Let’s find out.

The Facts
Ocasio-Cortez claimed on Twitter that $21 trillion in “Pentagon accounting errors” could have paid for 66 percent of the Medicare-for-all proposal. Her tweet references an article in the Nation, a left-leaning magazine. The specific line about the missing $21 trillion comes from research by Mark Skidmore, an economics professor at Michigan State University.

Skidmore has been tracking opaque federal budget moves for years. He tallied $21 trillion in unsupported accounting adjustments at the Pentagon from 1998 to 2015. The department’s comptroller says these are budgetary moves that “lack supporting documentation ... or are not tied to specific accounting transactions.”

In 2001, for example, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld testified to Congress that “we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” For 2015, the Pentagon reported $6.5 trillion in “unsupported journal voucher adjustments.”


Skidmore contends that the Pentagon has competent personnel and is no more complex than a large multinational corporation, which makes the trillion-dollar accounting gaps all the more puzzling.

“The ongoing and repeated nature of the unsupported journal voucher adjustments coupled with the seemingly enormous size of the adjustments warrants the attention of both citizens and elected officials,” Skidmore wrote in a 2017 paper, adding later, “It should be feasible to track revenues flowing in and expenditures flowing out, and share this information in a format that can be understood by literate people.”

Regardless, in the situation Skidmore is describing, the $21 trillion is not one big pot of dormant money collecting dust somewhere. It’s the sum of all transactions — both inflows and outflows — for which the Defense Department did not have adequate documentation. “The same dollar could be accounted for many times,” as Philip Klein wrote in the Washington Examiner.


Skidmore’s paper clearly talks about Pentagon “assets” and “liabilities.” This key distinction was duly noted in the Nation article that Ocasio-Cortez referenced on Twitter.

To be clear, Skidmore, in a report coauthored with Catherine Austin Fitts, a former assistant secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development who complained about similar plugs in HUD financial statements, does not contend that all of this $21 trillion was secret or misused funding. And indeed, the plugs are found on both the positive and the negative sides of the ledger, thus potentially netting each other out. But the Pentagon’s bookkeeping is so obtuse, Skidmore and Fitts added, that it is impossible to trace the actual sources and destinations of the $21 trillion.


But it did not appear in her tweet, which clearly implied that the $21 trillion could have been used to pay for 66 percent of the $32 trillion in estimated Medicare-for-All costs.

“To clarify, this is to say that we only demand fiscal details [with health and education], rarely elsewhere,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a follow-up tweet.

“The point, I think, was more about how we care so little about the ‘how do you pay for it’ when we are talking about war and military spending,” her spokesman wrote in an email. “It’s only when we are talking about investing in the physical and economic well-being of our citizenry that we become concerned with the price tags.”

Would Bernie Sanders's 'Medicare for All' save $2 trillion? | Fact Checker
Democrats across the country are touting 'Medicare for All,' but many candidates are leaving out important context. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)

That’s not the argument coming through in her original tweet, which has been retweeted by nearly 25,000 users. Most people reading the tweet are likely to take its flawed comparison at face value.

It’s also worth pointing out that Skidmore’s total covers 17 years (1998 to 2015), whereas the Urban Institute’s $32 trillion estimate for Sanders’s Medicare plan covers 10 years. So the two numbers are not apples-to-apples to begin with.


After this fact check was published, Pentagon spokesman Christopher Sherwood said “DoD hasn’t received $21 trillion in (nominal) appropriated funding across the entirety of American history.”

“Money Congress appropriates for DoD stays at the Department of the Treasury until they make a payment on behalf of DoD,” he said. “Any funds that remain unspent at the end of the period of availability will remain at the Department of the Treasury and are no longer available to DoD at that point.”

The Pentagon is working to fix the accounting gaps, Sherwood added, "by reducing the labor needed to manually enter the Journal Vouchers and reducing the time it takes to perform research” for account reconciliation.

Let’s put $21 trillion in context. The entire national debt is $21.8 trillion. According to the Congressional Budget Office, total defense spending from 1998 to 2015 was nearly $9 trillion. The CBO estimates $7 trillion in defense spending from 2019 to 2028.


In other words, completely defunding the military for the next decade would yield only one-fifth of $32 trillion. That’s a much better way of illustrating the cost of Medicare-for-All.

The Pinocchio Test
Swing and a miss!

Ocasio-Cortez is not the first Twitter user to mangle information from a news report. But it’s unconvincing to try to pass this off as a rhetorical point being misread. She cited the $21 trillion figure and said “66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon.”

That’s a direct comparison. It’s badly flawed. The same article she referenced on Twitter would have set her straight. The tweet is still up, probably causing confusion. So we will award Four Pinocchios to Ocasio-Cortez.

Four Pinocchios

How the left can lecture the right about Donald Trump and promote this fake news supporting, non fact checking idiot is abhorrent.

She is a knee jerk, panderer just like Trump.

How the left can lecture the right about Donald Trump and promote this fake news supporting, non fact checking idiot is abhorrent.

She is a knee jerk, panderer just like Trump.

No argument here. But are you surprised by the hypocrisy? "Trumps an idiot! But Cortez, that's a go getter there! AOC 2020!!"

Boo hoo .. sour grapes and conservative tears. Enjoy. Dems in the house bro

Real mature.

How shocking! The trump supporters hating on another women.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez...

She's got the numbers wrong, but she has the thinking right.

If you can harness all the waste, I bet it makes a pretty big dent in Medicare for all.. or whatever it ends up being called

Wait .... posting stupid idiotic emails with no basis in reality is news now???? I thought that it was called Fake News - that's what Trump has been claiming.

smh.

And another fantastic grouping and tarnishing of everyone who doesn't align with your view points as "The Left" .... I see that on a lot of your posts. Nice.

J/C

SMH, not even 15 post in and the sexist/cards are being thrown around. Come to think about it, that's actually more than I expected.

.


I think it's really sad, that exactly what I said happens happened with this board. Just about everyone in this thread on the left said "But TRUMP"! Defending the same half logic half lies that Trump constantly perpetuates. I literally said it in my second post but these guys just cannot help themselves. If Trump is embarrassing....so is this.


However, she is not a fringe person anymore, The Intercept is promoting this person as a Presidential candidate before she is even eligible. Holding this person to a lower standard because she is a woman and a minority is actual sexism. Coddling her viewpoints because she is a minority is actual racism.


To your point, I know I have digressed. Again, it's the same with Trump, a lot of his ideas are based on a solid argument but he just bungles the delivery and facts on a consistent basis. You're right, the idea to cut Military spending isn't a bad one but the delivery and facts....were absolutely butchered. Holding her to a different standard is hilarious leftist hypocrisy.

One man's waste is another man's retirement plan. Somebody is always making (pocketing) the money that is being wasted, good luck fixing that.

One man's waste is another man's retirement plan. Somebody is always making (pocketing) the money that is being wasted, good luck fixing that.

Cortez may have her head and heart in the right place.. Cut waste, spend the money on things that REALLY matter. Sounds like a good plan, Getting there is the problem.

But I wish she'd do some fact checking first.

When Trump spends 75 million to move troops to the Border to answer some dog whistle garbage then let's them sit there in the heat with virtually nothing to do, who's retirement plan are we taking money from?

So me calling this lie/fake news out means she doesn't align with my views on the left? Not following the logic here.

The Right is so full of hate they can't even recognize a doctored photo - even one as badly photoshopped as this one! No wonder the Right are so full of hate.

The fake news comment from me is that Trump rails against all the negative press and media he gets - he calls it fake news.

He goes on incoherent, inaccurate, bordering on witness tampering tweet rages --- the press cover the content of his tweets and discuss how wrong or how unhinged his comments are .... and Trump then calls that fake news.

AND ... As I have said multiple times - you can find idiots posting idiotic things online from both the left and the right. By grabbing moronic things that people on the extremes post online and acting like it somehow represents the majority who are 99% more centrist is asinine. I'll go grab some examples of stupid things "The Right" have posted online and post them and then say "This is how the Right thinks" .... and maybe you'll get my point? And adding "Most of the left" doesn't reduce the redundancy of the comments.