Recently, I read two articles that blew my mind. Perhaps they will blow your mind too.

1) The first article talks about how the US Army fudged $6.8 trillion in accounting entries in 2015 to balance its books. The Defense Department’s Inspector General said the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up. What?

“At first glance adjustments totaling trillions may seem impossible. The amounts dwarf the Defense Department’s entire budget. Making changes to one account also require making changes to multiple levels of sub-accounts, however. That created a domino effect where, essentially, falsifications kept falling down the line. In many instances this daisy-chain was repeated multiple times for the same accounting item,” Scot J. Paltrow writes.

While the government goes after regular folks who get their taxes wrong because there are so many rules, it turns a blind eye on $6.8 TRILLION in accounting errors? This seems like a huge double standard and an abdication of responsibility. An army spokesman later downplayed the significance of the improper charges, and said the real error in question is “only” about $62.4 billion. Come on now. $62.4 billion is still a massive amount of money that has vanished into thin air.

$62.4 billion a year in misappropriated funds can:

* Create 1,248,000 new social worker jobs paying $50,000 a year

* Create 624,000 new teaching jobs that pay $100,000 a year

* Line the pockets of 62,400 corrupt officials by $1,000,000 a year

* Really line the coffers of 1,000 contractors by $62,400,000 a year

“Nobody knows where the money is going,” said Franklin Spinney, a retired military analyst for the Pentagon and critic of Defense Department planning. But actually we do know where the money is going. Its going into the pockets of the top 0.1% government employees charged with handling the budget in the form of under the table money, salaries and bonuses and the pockets of companies that receive defense contracts.