83 The Real Game of Missing Money · Or to understand how this has drained your community, see: “Is Your Community Waving Goodbye to $3.3 Billion?” · For what you can do about it, see: “The Solari Report Building Wealth Collection.” Building Empire Global “empire building” and the deployment of our military to support that effort has resulted in a huge loss of domestic investment, GNP, and tax revenue. Since the end of the Cold War, the deployment of military, intelligence, and special forces assets globally has increased significantly, as have related expenditures. This has shifted expenditures from domestic economic activity to global activity as the Army, contractors, and support func- tions move abroad. This is compounded by the fact that the most recent U.S. invasions of Af- ghanistan and Iraq have exceeded their original costs by many multiples, with numerous reports of monies disappearing mysteriously along the way. Trying to limit the “mission creep” of this part of the budget has seemed impossible and has been the subject of numerous books, including Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Secu- rity State by Dana Priest and William Arkin and Blank Check by Tim Weiner. Congress is now in the position of trying to rein back an insatiable security state—a dangerous thing to do. Economic Health The vast majority of the people lobbying the federal government are focused on what is in the specific interest of those who are paying their way, as opposed to what makes the pie bigger for everyone. Unfortunately, those lobbyists and the interests they serve have become our elected of- ficials’ real “constituency.” Consequently, we find few in government or elsewhere whose primary focus and concern is the overall economic health of the domestic economy or the welfare of those they have been entrusted to represent. The Housing Bill that nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2008 was a perfect example of the political allocation of federal resources with complete indifference to the economic health of the country. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation is now marketing a new documentary called I.O.U.S.A. I have only seen the trailer. Based on reading the website and watching the trailer, I’d say that it is slick, Orwellian hogwash. If the national debt was almost ten trillion dollars before the housing bill and, if my estimate is right, approximately ten trillion dollars has been stolen since 1997, then do we have a debt prob- lem or do we have an aristocracy problem? One of the beauties of I.O.U.S.A. is that all the luminaries interviewed as experts on this “debt problem” were in a position to stop or warn us that the $10 trillion dollars was leaving. They did not. President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned U.S. citizens about the “military–in- dustrial complex” in his farewell address.