Rich Blogs ... Again

Every time they scratched their asses, they earned; there was so much money around for contractors, officials literally used $100,000 wads of cash as toys. "Yes -- $100 bills in plastic wrap," Frank Willis, a former CPA official, acknowledged in Senate testimony about Custer Battles. "We played football with the plastic-wrapped bricks for a little while."

This reminded me of a scene in Cocaine Cowboys where Jon Roberts describes finding bricks of $100 bills in his horse feed that he doesn't even remember hiding.

The Great Iraq Swindle

Update

According to the most reliable ­estimates, we have doled out more than $500 billion for the war, as well as $44 billion for the Iraqi reconstruction effort. And what did America's contractors give us for that money? They built big steaming shit piles, set brand-new trucks on fire, drove back and forth across the desert for no reason at all and dumped bags of nails in ditches.

Steve just described to me how Keynesian economists feel that spending (created by demand from consumers OR the government) and full employment are signs of a healthy economy. He disagreed with this point of view, giving the hypothetical example of the government paying everyone to dig ditches full-time and then fill them back up again ...