77 The Real Game of Missing Money · The government’s cost of waging war is on-budget. But, the assets acquired in those wars are preserved for the benefit of insiders, often through local “agents” that outsource and “privatize,” joint venture, or simply function as puppets. · Policies and regulations are crafted to transfer benefits to insiders while transferring (ex- ternalizing) liabilities to the taxpayers. We can see the results of this process in increasing health care and unemployment costs, for example. · Trillions of dollars that have been used for bank bailouts are off-budget or engineered with FDIC insurance, Fannie and Freddie takeovers, FHA insurance, and the Federal Reserve actions that ultimately result in the expense coming back on the budget and in turn being subsidized by the citizenry (see “Bailout ‘Mo Money” in the Solari Library). To add insult to injury, the resulting bank profits are only lightly taxed while bonuses increase. · The government funded the space program for decades and paid defense contractors tril- lions to learn and acquire all the technology involved. Now that we are ready to proceed with energy and mining projects in space, space exploration is being privatized. So, the benefits of valuable IP that was paid for by the taxpayer will now accrue to these corpora- tions. Essentially, the U.S. federal budget is designed to absorb liabilities (risk and expense) into the public sector while transferring assets to the private sector. This imbalance must be addressed to make the federal budget and finances economically viable. Globally, the process of “piratization” is pushing federal finances in the opposite direction from accountability and viability—see my popular blog post, “Financial Coup d’ Etat.” Currently, there is no political process to facilitate fiscal responsibility, short of war, wholesale tax revolt, or collapse. Restoration There are trillions of dollars missing from federal accounts, as documented by the federal govern- ment itself. The reports of significant money missing from the United States government over the years are many, including Kelly Patricia O’Meara’s series for Insight Magazine on money missing from the U.S. government and Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele’s investigative reporting published in Vanity Fair on monies missing in U.S. operations in the Middle East. For a time, there were so many stories on monies disappearing from the U.S. government that we kept track of them on a part of the Solari website dedicated to stories about money missing from the feder- al government: Solari: The Missing Money (https://missingmoney.solari.com/). Kelly O’Meara’s series on the missing money attracted significant attention in 2000 and 2001. Things seemed to be coming to a head on September 10, 2001, when Donald Rumsfeld conceded in a press conference that DOD was missing