U.S. “Intelligence” Spending: A Whale of a Bad Joke
By Robert Higgs • Monday November 1, 2010 10:48 AM PDT • 14 Comments
The government has announced that total spending on “intelligence activities” in fiscal year 2010 was $80.1 billion. According to a report in the Washington Post,
The National Intelligence Program, run by the CIA and other agencies that report to the Director of National Intelligence, cost $53.1 billion in fiscal 2010, which ended Sept. 30, while the Military Intelligence Program cost an additional $27 billion.
Although this is the first time that the total amount has been made public, analysts have long pegged it with fair accuracy. Of course, this species of spending is now at an all-time high. Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, affirms that it is also more than twice the amount spent in 2001. It increased 7 percent in the past year alone.
In recent years, we have become accustomed to reading reports of enormous government spending — billions, trillions, gazillions. These numbers mean practically nothing to ordinary people. Out here in peasant-land, we have trouble enough in trying to figure out how we’ll pay a $400 bill for the electricity used in August.
So, let’s try to bring the “intelligence” spending into comprehensible focus by using a little arithmetic and asking a few questions.
First, the $80.1 billion the federal government spent on “intelligence” activities in fiscal 2010 translates to approximately $1,000 for each family of four persons. You can imagine the sort of benefit you get from spending that much money, say, to purchase about 400 gallons of fuel for your car — enough to drive the car 8,000 miles, at a 20 mpg rate of fuel consumption. Or enough to purchase electricity while your air conditioner is running flat out through the summer months. You get the idea: $1,000 is not an amount the average family can afford to sneeze at; the family must take care to get a substantial benefit in exchange for that much of its money.
Now, think of all the concrete benefits you get from the government’s spending for “intelligence.” Go on, think about them — not in vague terms, such as “protection from terrorists,” in but concrete terms that you can relate directly to your family’s well-being. Go on. I’m waiting.
If you are honest, you will admit that you cannot think of any concrete benefit whatsoever that you are getting — unless, of course, a member of your family happens to be employed in one of the thousands of so-called intelligence operations run by the government and its vast corps of “national security” contractors. The government constantly assures you, of course, that you are “being protected,” but the protectors do not spell out exactly how all of this spying is protecting you or from whom in particular you are being protected. All you are expected to do is to credit the government’s vague statements to the effect that it is working day and night to protect you from nameless “terrorists” who are said to be equally devoted to the destruction of your family.
What these nameless terrorists expect to gain by, say, wiping out my family, ensconced here in rural St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, I cannot fathom. No doubt your family has a higher priority than mine does on the terrorists’ hit list, yet if you are honest, you will be compelled to admit that the chance that you and yours will be harmed in any way by a handful of homicidal maniacs lurking “out there” somewhere is much, much less than the chance that you will die in an automobile accident or a household mishap, such as a fire.
Moreover, the so-called intelligence gathering that the government bankrolls so lavishly is aimed in great part, not at Muslim madmen, but at you and me. The government’s banks of super-computers and legions of apparatchiki are busily gleaning data on your telephone calls, Internet messages and Web searches, financial and other business transactions, and virtually everything else that touches your life in a way that can be snatched into data banks by soulless bureaucrats and techno-flunkies. Yet, while every nook and cranny of your privacy is being invaded, at your expense, you are being assured that these official crimes are all legitimate means of protecting you from grave, impending harm. Should we also believe in fairy tales and ghost stories?
Let’s face it: this “intelligence” gambit is nothing but the latest government hoax to extract money from your bank account and to subject you to wholly unjustifiable deprivations of your just rights. If you think it’s anything else, you probably have not paid it much attention or given it much thought.
Tags: Budget and Tax Policy, Civil Liberties, Defense, Personal Liberty, Power, Privacy, Surveillance, Terrorism, The State 
I recently received a first-hand look at all the wonderful security services we’re paying for at gunpoint during several airport connections.
The TSA did their level best to strip (literally) all passengers of any last hint of dignity or privacy. Evidently the Fourth Amendment does not apply at airport terminals. Funny, I don’t remember that caveat in the Constitution. Must have missed it.
Not content with wanding us and patting us down, the TSA goons at San Francisco airport now have the latest strip search machines at their disposal. I’m sure the nudie pictures of 85-year-old wheelchair-ridden grandmothers will make us safer somehow.
What country has America become? When will people have their fill of government “security”?
Steve Hogan | Nov 1, 2010 | Reply
What the intelligence budget is really for is to justify the previous intelligence budgets. If the government stopped spending money and infringing liberties for “intelligence” purposes and nothing bad happened people would say “Hey why did we spend all that money and oppress all those people?”. There’s no good answer to this so the “Intelligence Community” has to keep playing “Keep away the alligators”.
Michael Price | Nov 2, 2010 | Reply
So many shovel ready projects for the NSA and CIA, in one part of my state the federal government has built a new multimillion dollar building every year for the past 10 years, fusion center, terrorist response center, response team training facility, NSA data center, CIA operations center and the list goes on. I would worry about their seeing this post and entering another note on my record but its pointless, they know and see all—Total Information Awareness—means they know everything about me probably down to the minute.
I contracted for the DoD in the past and so have an extensive file with many agencies and even worked on some of the peta-byte storage facilities for the very data I worry is being collected. This is the quandary of any patriot, as the intelligence community invades our lives and violates our rights, many of the contractors have moral qualms about helping them to do it yet the money is exceedingly good, we can be bought, every last one of us.
The intelligence community knows that there is something in your life that you are willing to sacrifice your ideals for and very few of us indeed are willing to truly become Guy Fauks or face the wrath of the government to stand for our ideals.
bob | Nov 2, 2010 | Reply
My thoughts too, Dr. Higgs.
ralph | Nov 2, 2010 | Reply
Also, see related article by Julian Glover in the Sunday Oct 31 edition of the UK Guardian.
ralph | Nov 2, 2010 | Reply
An equally good question is why, after the collapse of Soviet Union, do we still need 12 aircraft carrier battle groups? Expenditures are justified by so-called threats but when the threat disappears the expenditures keep on expending. Whatever happened to the “Peace Dividend” promised in 1989 and 1990.
We had to turn our former friend Saddam Hussein into a new Hitler in order to maintain military funding. It is just same with “Intelligence”.
John Jacques | Nov 2, 2010 | Reply
I’ve known for many years who the terrorists are that REALLY scare me, and they don’t have foreign names! My grandmother once told me: “You’ve got more to fear from the living than from ghosts.” Now I know who she meant.
Jerry | Nov 2, 2010 | Reply
In all the political babbling about “keeping us safe,” no mention is ever made of changing U.S. foreign policy. All so-called respectable political discourse assumes that it is “our” God-given right to murder and oppress Muslims; therefore, it is not even worth considering to stop. Better to lose all our liberties, our wealth and possibly our lives than to mind our own business and leave the Muslims alone.
So, the government will deficit-spend the country into squalor, lining the pockets of the elites with trillions of dollars, ostensibly to prevent an attack that will cost the perpetrators a few hundred or thousand at most. Eventually, one will slip through and the ensuing hysteria will be used to justify more of the same, but worse.
Insanity is the norm.
Robert B. | Nov 2, 2010 | Reply
Want to know who the real terrorists are?
Open up a dictionary. I believe it’s something like “those who use fear and intimidation in order to further or achieve political means.”
Although the word was invented by Mossad, it fits.
Sound like your government? Well, if you think that’s what a pinko, commie, hemp-wearing “liberal” would say, you can use George W. Bush’s definition, instead.
They hate you for your freedoms.
How are Americans ignoring this?!?
Adam | Nov 2, 2010 | Reply
NSA & Military Intelligence is about ‘Protection’. CIA & Homeland is about ‘Politics’. NSA & our honorable/patriotic Signals Analysts of the military protect/save/keep us & our children safe from harm around the clock. There are lurking wolfs that we are blind to, but they are not. They are singled out & chosen for their jobs, because of their inner goodness & archangel characteristics. If more people only knew what they know...see what they see...hear what they hear...stop...what they...stop. They are at all times watching our backs. Always.
CIA & Homeland are the total opposite. Shiver. We have much to fear concerning them, but never fear. Good SHALL prevail!
Woodsybit | Nov 3, 2010 | Reply
Don’t blow smoke when I write this, but how can people be so dumb? The very folks the government is setting up for the guillotine are the very ones they have taken oaths to protect. What the vicious rulers are doing is ‘big-time’. The Inquisition years ago missed a few, this time around they are not going to let anybody escape. The so-call ‘never again’ holocaust fanfare is only a fairy tale, but this time around it is not the so-called Jews, it just may be those reserved descendants of the other 10 tribes whom Jesus redeemed, those born with a conscience that already knows the Lord’s voice. (Those real Americans).
The scripture states every human in the world that don’t worship the “Image of the Beast” will be be-headed. Government has become God, and they know they have to deceive and betray by their lies.Why can’t anyone see the Kingdom of the Anti-Christ is what Washington, DC is all about? Why can’t any one see the government is rewarding anyone that will help them ‘stack’ the cards against those that believe in righteousness? What they determine to do, must be swift. Grab another cup of coffee, and wake up. We had better know ‘whom we believe in’.Go Figure.
George | Nov 3, 2010 | Reply
If America will accept “chemtrails” on a weekly basis, they will accept anything.
daddysteve | Nov 5, 2010 | Reply