We all misplace valuable things sometimes. Many of us have lost our phones, purses or other valuables.
Sometimes we lose money, too: Change falls out of our pockets, and we find it months later in between the cushions of the sofa while looking for the remote. That said, I don’t know anyone that has lost $6 billion.
Except Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
A report published last week by the inspector general indicates that, since Clinton took over as Secretary of State, over $6 billion is missing from her department. Most of this money was flagged to be used to pay contractors for their services, though all of those contracts have either gone missing or have lost crucial information.
We don’t know who the money was going to, what it was paying for or if the transactions were actually completed. And when I say “we don’t know,” I don’t mean the information is classified and has been withheld from the public; I actually mean that the government genuinely doesn’t know, that the information was either lost or never recorded.
In the bucket of total government expenditures, $6 billion seems like a drop, but it’s an especially painful pill to swallow during tax season. That’s enough money to give all American taxpayers $50 refunds on their personal income taxes.
Alternatively, that money could be used to increase the Department of Education’s budget by 15 percent. This is especially concerning when put into perspective with regards to the total amount of money Clinton was handling.
Clinton doesn’t know if our money was stolen by her employees. She doesn’t know if it was taken by Internet hackers. She doesn’t know if it was stolen from the vault in a “Mission Impossible”-style heist. Just about the only place she knows it didn’t go to was Benghazi.
None of us would be OK with just “misplacing” our income, and our government shouldn’t be either. Plus, every day, Clinton looks more and more like the Democratic nominee for president in 2016.
Are we as a nation going to be complacent in letting our leaders — one day perhaps even our president — just say “oops” when billions of dollars of our money just walks away?