>The military bought the hammer, Kelman explained, bundled into one bulk purchase of many different spare parts. But when the contractors allocated their engine

>The military bought the hammer, Kelman explained, bundled into one bulk purchase of many different spare parts. But when the contractors allocated their engineering expenses among the individual spare parts on the list-a bookkeeping exercise that had no effect on the price the Pentagon paid overall-they simply treated every item the same. So the hammer, originally $15, picked up the same amount of research and development overhead-$420-as each of the highly technical components, recalled retired procurement official LeRoy Haugh. (Later news stories inflated the $435 figure to $600.) "we didn't ACTUALLY spend that much on a hammer, we just averaged it out across a bulk purchase! See, we aren't terrible with money." Framing something as 'the myth of the $600 hammer' is implicitly pointing to external sources (congress, journalists) and messaging that they 'invented a myth' that the military spent $600 on a hammer. They didn't invent anything. They worked with the information that was provided to them by the military. If you wanted to discuss the same issue, but under a framing that wasn't disingenuous, you could title it something like 'the reality of abysmal and misleading accounting throughout the military and their contractors'.