Today we have a Pentagon that is spending more money (in inflation adjusted dollars) on defense than at any time since WWII, yet it can not pass the relatively simple audits required by the Chief Financial Officer's Act of 1990. This law was intended to put teeth into the Accountability and Appropriations clauses of the Constitution. The audits required by the CFO Act are “checks and balances” audits — they merely describe whether or no any agency of the federal government spends the money Congress appropriated on the items Congress authorized for appropriations — essentially the line between where the money comes from and where it goes. The attached article helps to put the implications of this travesty into a frightening perspective. CS
BY JUSTIN LOGAN, American Conservative, 1 Mar 2010
Periodically, it is worth remembering just how much the American Founders detested the signs of a bloated state: standing armies, a large fiscal-military federation, and a capacious national bureaucracy. It may be going too far to say that today’s conservatives would denounce the Founding Fathers as unpatriotic conservatives—but not much too far. While members of the Right now flutter like schoolgirls at the mention of military leaders like Gen. David Petraeus, the Founders scorned the prospect of military leaders becoming figures of worshipful esteem. As the historian Arthur Ekirch has highlighted, aversion to standing armies and centralism was at the heart of the American founding.
