Oh shit....Strike that!

Official Reveals Budget for U.S. Intelligence

In an apparent slip, a top American intelligence official has revealed at a public conference what has long been secret: the amount of money the United States spends on its spy agencies. At an intelligence conference in San Antonio last week, Mary Margaret Graham, a 27-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency and now the deputy director of national intelligence for collection, said the annual intelligence budget was $44 billion. The number was reported Monday in U.S. News and World Report, whose national security reporter, Kevin Whitelaw, was among the hundreds of people in attendance during Ms. Graham's talk. "I thought, 'I can't believe she said that,' "

Forty-four billion? That's no drop in the bucket. Add that to the almost 1/2 trillion reported military budget and it starts to add up. The U.S. spends as much on defense as all the other countries in the world combined...