Who pays and who profits
Two ledgers, kept separately, and the whole argument is what happens when you put them side by side.
Who pays
- Districts that pay in people. Enlistment is not evenly distributed, and the places that supply the most are usually not the places that decide the most. That is a documentable fact about recruitment data and district maps, not an accusation.
- The public balance sheet, indefinitely, through debt service on spending that was never reauthorised.
- Everyone whose priorities were displaced — the appropriation that did not happen because this one did.
Who profits
- Contractors whose revenue depends on continuation. This is the core of it. When ending a commitment is a business loss for organisations with lobbying capacity, ending it acquires an organised opponent and continuing it acquires none.
- Budgets and research money sent abroad — American money buying capability that ends up outside American control. See Removing democracy from the outside.
- Careers built on the arrangement, inside and outside government, which is the least documented and most durable of the three.
What we publish, and what we refuse to publish
We publish the appropriation, the contract, the roll call and the disclosure, each linked to its primary source, with the arithmetic between them shown in full.
We do not say that any living member of Congress voted for a war because a contractor paid them. That is a crime, and unless a court established it we do not state it as fact. The record and the arithmetic go on the page; the conclusion is the reader's. See Money in politics for the same discipline applied generally.
Reading it one member at a time
The aggregate is where the argument starts; the seat is where a citizen can do something. What your own member voted for is in Voting Records, what that record earned is in Politicians, and who could hold the seat instead is Replacing Captured Incumbents.