The author ventured into the world of Pentagon accounting to try to determine the real costs incurred by American taxpayers to impose the Empire's dominance over the rest of the world. In contrast to domestic social spending, such costs are rarely debated in the halls of Congress.
Ever the fool and armed only with the power of searchable PDFs, I nonetheless plunged into the bizarro world of Pentagon accounting, where ledgers are sometimes still handwritten and $1 billion can be a rounding error. I reviewed thousands of pages of budget documents, government and independent reports, and hundreds of line items for everything from shopping malls to military intelligence to postal subsidies.