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Anyone got an extra 400,000 bucks to fix the U.S. economy ?

I saw a while back an article that showed where tone of money went unaccounted for, just dissapeared.......money that was given to help rebuild Iraque..... US tax payers will pay,......

To get some idea of the scale: contractors absorb the taxes paid by everyone in America with incomes under $100,000. In other words, more than 90 percent of all taxpayers might as well remit everything they owe directly to SAIC or some other contractor rather than to the IRS.

The Spoils of War - Billions over Baghdad

...$2.4 billion in $100 bills...Forty pallets of cash, weighing 30 tons, were loaded that day. The tractor-trailer turned back onto Route 17...The money was transferred to a C-130 transport plane. The next day, it arrived in Baghdad.

That transfer of cash to Iraq was the largest one-day shipment of currency in the history of the New York Fed. It was not, however, the first such shipment of cash to Iraq. Beginning soon after the invasion and continuing for more than a year, $12 billion in U.S. currency was airlifted to Baghdad

What Washington did not do was mobilize to keep track of it. By all accounts, the New York Fed and the Treasury Department exercised strict surveillance and control over all of this money while it was on American soil. But after the money was delivered to Iraq, oversight and control evaporated. Of the $12 billion in U.S. banknotes delivered to Iraq in 2003 and 2004, at least $9 billion cannot be accounted for...

...Over the next year, a compliant Congress gave $1.6 billion to Bremer to administer the C.P.A. This was over and above the $12 billion in cash

...Accountable really to no one, its finances "off the books" for U.S. government purposes, the C.P.A. provided an unprecedented opportunity for fraud, waste, and corruption involving American government officials, American contractors, renegade Iraqis, and many others. In its short life more than $23 billion would pass through its hands. And that didn't include potentially billions more in oil shipments the C.P.A. neglected to meter.

...the country was turned into "a free-fraud zone."
During the C.P.A.'s little more than a year of life, the New York Federal Reserve Bank made 21 shipments of currency to Iraq totaling $11,981,531,000. All told, the Fed would ship 281 million individual banknotes, in bricks weighing a total of 363 tons.

Fraud" was simply another word for "business as usual." Of 8,206 "guards" drawing paychecks courtesy of the C.P.A., only 602 warm bodies could in fact be found; the other 7,604 were ghost employees. Halliburton, the government contractor once headed by Vice President****Cheney, charged the C.P.A. for 42,000 daily meals for soldiers while in fact serving only 14,000 of them. Cash was handed out from the backs of pickup trucks. On one occasion a C.P.A. official received $6.75 million in cash with the expectation he would shell it out in one week. Another time, the C.P.A. decided to spend $500 million on "security." No specifics, just a half-billion dollars for security, with this cryptic explanation: "Composition TBD"—that is, "to be determined."

In the south-central region of Iraq a contracting officer stored $2 million in a safe in his bathroom. One agent kept $678,000 in an unsecured footlocker. Another agent turned over some $23 million to his team of "paying agents" to deliver to contractors, but documentation could be found for only $6.3 million of it. One project officer received $350,000 to fund human-rights projects, but in the end could account for less than $200,000 of it. Two C.P.A. agents left Iraq without accounting for two payments of $715,000 and $777,000. The money has never been found.

On April 26, another shipment of cash-laden pallets, this one holding $750 million, arrived at Baghdad International Airport. On May 18 the Fed made a $1 billion shipment, which was followed on June 22 by the biggest single shipment ever made by the Fed anywhere—$2.4 billion. Another $1.6 billion arrived three days later, bringing the total of cash shipments to Iraq to $5 billion in the C.P.A.'s final three months.

In one of his last official acts before leaving Baghdad, Bremer issued an order—prepared by the Pentagon, he says—declaring that all coalition-force members "shall be immune from any form of arrest or detention other than by persons acting on behalf of their Sending States." Contractors also got the same get-out-of-jail-free card. According to Bremer's order, "contractors shall be immune from Iraqi legal process with respect to acts performed by them pursuant to the terms and conditions of a Contract or any sub-contract thereto." The Iraqi people, who had had no say over Saddam Hussein's illegal conduct during his dictatorship, would have no say over illegal conduct by Americans in their new democracy.

In our fifth year in the war in Iraq," according to Alan Grayson, the attorney for whistle-blowers, "the Bush administration has not litigated a single case against any war profiteer under the False Claims Act." This at a time, Grayson told a congressional committee, when "billions of dollars are missing and many billions more wasted."

There has been no rush to explain even this one small part of the story, that of the missing Iraqi billions. No one in the U.S. government wants to talk about NorthStar Consultants, much less about the money that disappeared.

The simple truth about the missing money is the same one that applies to so much else about the American occupation of Iraq. The U.S. government never did care about accounting for those Iraqi billions and it doesn't care now. It cares only about ensuring that an accounting does not occur.

The mid-session review of the federal budget released during the past week saw the White House revise its outlook for the deficit towards nominal highs. The administration is forecasting that the deficit will come in at $389 billion in 2008 and the 2009 deficit should arrive at $482 billion.

The provisional estimate is a snapshot of current spending plans that does not take into account the emerging economic reality. This year seven banks have failed, which may be a grim preview of the forthcoming problems among regional and second-tier banks. The economic slowdown has generated tax receipts through the first nine months of fiscal 2008 equal to 17.9% of GDP, which is less than the 40-year average. The second half of 2008 is shaping up to be especially painful for the economy and equally deleterious for the federal budget. This time frame, which will bridge the final quarter of fiscal 2008 and first quarter of fiscal 2009, implies that the current assumptions underlying the administrations estimates are more than just a bit rosy.

The $482 billion dollar estimate for fiscal 2009 does not reflect what we expect to be the defining features of the Federal Budget throughout the remainder of the year and well into the new administration. First, pressure for a second stimulus has begun to build as the county moves closer to the election. We expect that when the Congress convenes in the fall that the political calculus in Washington will overtake budgetary sanity and that the House and Senate will pass with veto proof majorities a second fiscal stimulus package. We will take the current conventional wisdom on the Capitol Hill as true and attach an additional $60 billion dollar price tag to 2009 budget.

Second, the FDIC has accepted into receivership 7 banks so far this year after only taking over three in 2007. At the end of Q3'07 the FDIC had $53 billion on account to respond to a crisis among member banks. The seizure of Indy Mac, with $32 billion in assets will put a major dent in that rainy day fund at the FDIC. Based on our very conservative estimate the FDIC may require up to additional $10 billion in funding which will add to the deficit in 2009. The failure of another major bank or a wave of bank failures on a regional basis will require a special supplemental to be passed, to inject funds to cover insured deposits by the FDIC.

Thus, once one starts to make a provisional estimate of what the true deficit may look like in 2009, in all probability it will arrive in the mid $550 billion range with a possible upside to $630 billion depending on how the financial crisis on Wall Street plays out and just how far it spills over to Main Street. Just to be complete, our forecast does not consider off balance sheet activities, ongoing foreign operations that remain off the official books any prospective response to the problems in Social Security that could get under way as early as 2012.

The trend in Federal expenditures under current assumptions, much less the contingencies that we have outlined within the context of continued stress in financial markets will constrain the ability of private economic actors to borrow. For years, economists have warned about the problem of unsustainable deficits to mostly deaf ears. Under conditions of a functioning global market for capital, the US could get away with its profligate ways. But, with money tight on a domestic basis and global creditors increasingly concerned about the financial health of Washington, the conditions are ripe for a fiscal crisis. Should this occur US consumers would observe a sharp rise in the cost of borrowing a concomitant fall in the value of the greenback and a genuine political breakdown. One hopes that this is discussed in more than a tangential manner during the upcoming election.

http://www.safehaven.com/article-10884.htm

Democrats have no common sense they never did and never will. so how can they fix the us economy? They can't . it should be against the law for any democrat to vote for anything if they have no common sense how in the name of god can they vote for the right persons that would help the economy, the most intelligent people in the united states can't vote for anyone without common sense, but the dumb people in the united states can make the right choice and vote for the people that will lead this country and have the best economy and health care in the world all they need is common sense.