Saturday, October 27, 2012

Following the money...


The election tempo has picked up. The President will visit here today. My wife is figuring out how to get to and from work with the least amount of traffic impact. New Hampshire is a swing state, let's hope it swings toward women's issues, towards an efficient and reasonable way to govern, towards Hassen, Kuster and Shea – Porter to run NH.
I have very slowly been reading Rachel Maddow's book Drift. One factoid popped out at me. (There are a lot of eye popping facts in the books all multi–sourced.) 874,000 people will be getting new top secret clearances to support the war on terror. At I ask.com they estimate a background investigation for a TS costs between $3000 and 15000 dollars. One might use $9k as a rough figure. So that's 874000 times 9000 dollars each or $7.8B just for the background investigations.  I wonder who gets that money? Who does those investigations?
Now I am not picking on Bush for starting this program or Obama for continuing it. It may be justified. But to those who wonder about the deficit consider the cost of these investigations in the grand scheme of things. We are changing the way we gather information about perceived enemies, inadvertently about ourselves, let's make sure we are still the US of America after this transition.

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