In shady business dealings involving Hunter Biden, there was once a time when it was said that Hunter had to give 10% of the lucrative profits to the Big Guy, later understood to be his papa, Joe Biden. While shady business dealings can allow for 10% skimming, you might ask by how much federal government spending can be skimmed.
When trying to protect one’s own money, such as in retail stores, there is something called “shrink” and it is expected each and every year. Some of your own money is going to go “missing” each year, even if you spend funds on Loss Prevention. Even with efforts at Loss Prevention, it is money that cannot be tracked or found.
When output is $5 billion or more, the proportion of sales revenue lost is often 3% or more:
You may notice two things when applying this estimate to federal spending:
federal spending is “someone else’s” money, not watched over as closely
federal spending is way beyond the $5 billion mark when losses reach 3%
But even though those two things mean that expected losses — often from corrupt “skimming” — will be higher than 3% of federal spending each and every year, let’s just conservatively assume it is 3% that cannot be tracked or found. How much skimming is possible each year?
With federal spending at $7.2 trillion for 2024, that means that there would be $216 billion dollars that year which cannot be tracked or found. That means that someone could make themselves richer by over $200 billion that year, and it cannot be tracked down (because even when it is your own money, like retail, they cannot track it).
In other words, the bigger the federal budget, the more fool-proof the skimming can get, until you reach a point where your skimming allows you to buy elections, etc. For this reason, it is imperative to shrink federal spending down to the point where 3% of it — ie, expected skim — would not be enough to alter political outcomes, such as elections.
Short Story
Heathrow: Hey Jethro, I just thought of a fool-proof way to get rich and powerful.
Jethro: How?
Heathrow: Each year of business in businesses big enough to have output of $5 billion, they end up losing about 3%.
Jethro: Can’t they stop that loss with Loss Prevention schemes?
Heathrow: No. They already employ Loss Prevention schemes, and the 3% number is what you get after you employ those schemes.
Jethro: Holy …
Heathrow: That’s right, Jethro. All we need to do is to convince people to spend cash on something, and then consistently skim 3% off the top — and it cannot be tracked or found.
Jethro: Oo, oo, oo — I have an idea!
Heathrow: What?
Jethro: Sell them something that they cannot see! That way they can’t audit the results.
Heathrow: Like what, though?
Jethro: We can sell them “carbon credits” and then just ask them to trust us that the credits are really and truly “working” — just as we convinced them they would.
Heathrow: Ingenious! No one can audit that! What else, Jethro? Where else can we tell them that cash must be spent?
Jethro: Let’s build a narrative around a “scary virus” — something so dire that we can say that over $4 trillion must be spent on it!
Heathrow: Okay, but that idea is a little harder, so we will have to deliberately attempt censorship on those persons who may have enough background epidemiological knowledge to audit it. We may be able to find/create a virus 50% worse than flu, but we’ll need lies in order to make it seem like it is 10x worse than flu.
Jethro: No probem! With over $4 trillion spent on the efforts, we can skim off enough to pay for the prior research to find/create a virus 50% worse than flu, and we can also easily buy up the press and pay for credentialed medical professionals to tow the line on the censorship and the lying that will be involved.
Heathrow: Deal!
Jethro: I love these fool-proof schemes to concentrate money and power!
Heathrow: Me, too, Jethro! Let’s get to work!
The End
Related to the story above:
Reference
[10% for the Big Guy] — https://oversight.house.gov/blog/key-excerpts-from-tony-bobulinskis-transcribed-interview/
[Big Business, even after employing Loss Prevention, can lose 3% every year] — https://ram.memberclicks.net/assets/docs/Sensormatic-Global-Shrink-Index.pdf
[federal spending allows for $200 billion in annual skimming] — U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Federal government total expenditures [W019RCQ027SBEA], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W019RCQ027SBEA
[over $4 trillion spent on a virus only 50% worse than flu] — https://www.usaspending.gov/disaster/covid-19?section=total_spending_by_budget_categories
Thanks Deep. Nice to see you use your data and writing skills on this topic.