o see if that'll make their life better and make the world better. Well, they just ended up testing $500 a month in cash. And guess what they concluded? Well, they concluded that people really like getting $500 in cash for doing no work. So they called it a success and said they're going to do more of it. That's right. The standard for judging whether it was successful was whether the people who got the free money were happy about it. I'm not making that up. Turns out that people are happy when you give them free money. Who knew? Maybe you could have asked me.

All right. Apparently the State Department is doing far fewer press briefings than before. To which I ask, why would you do any? What would the State Department tell you that Trump wouldn't tell you? It seems like if you have more than one government entity that's doing important press briefings in addition to Trump that all it does is create an opportunity for something to look like a misinterpretation or a conflict. So why would you ever have a press briefing from the State Department as long as Trump can cover all that same material, which he does on anything that matters. So yeah, that's the bar. Smart not to have them.

Well, apparently the Defense Department, or is it called the Department of War now? I don't know. They've confirmed that $11 billion, which is only a small fraction of the real number, has been stolen. $11 billion since 2017. And according to the GAO, it's only a small fraction of how much has been stolen of your tax money, just the stuff that was going to the Department of Defense. So the Pentagon, which spends about a trillion dollars a year, has never passed an audit.

Do you think we're better than Ukraine? You know, I've said this before, but when you look at the number of expensive homes and expensive cars, it doesn't really map to my understanding of how many legitimate jobs there are in the world that you can make that much money. It looks like, I mean I've been feeling this for a long time, that we're primarily a corruption economy. Not primarily, but that maybe something like 20% of the entire GDP is criminal. I don't know how big it is, but every time we look at any entity that has a budget, doesn't it always look the same? Like every time there's a big budget, be it Minneapolis, be it the Department of Defense, be it the NSA, be it USAID, every time there's a big budget, it's being stolen. New York City's budget, the city budgets, every time.

If we could solve one problem, which is the ability to audit where our money goes, everything would be different. So it feels like what the Trump administration needs to do, I don't even know if it's doable, is to find some way to insist that nobody ever gets a budget for anything unless there's a really dynamic auditing feature where everybody can see where every dollar goes. Short of that, it's just all being stolen. It doesn't matter if it's money for Ukraine or money for poor people or money for a disease or money for COVID. Every single time, every time it's being stolen. As a developed country, we can't figure out how to audit our stuff. I mean, it's crazy. It's crazy.

Anyway, here are some examples. A Pentagon contractor. I guess one of the ways or maybe the main way that this kind of money is stolen is there's kickbacks for sending money in one direction versus another. There are all these shell companies that are like fake companies pretending to do things that you would get money for but not reall