The little fact I keep in my mind on this topic is for a fraction of this cost the USA could have simply purchased all of non-urbanized Canada, and this would surely have been a far better investment.
Economic costs of war
161–170 of 618 posts
Re: Economic costs of war
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it owed to other countries?
Because they are the ones who lent the US the money. China is the #2 holder of US treasury bonds and currently own about 1T worth. (4% of the US national debt) Japan is the #1 holder at 1.2T. Source: https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt
No one "lent" us money. It's a fiat currency with a self-imposed limit on new money creation.
Re: Economic costs of war
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People that spend a year as soldiers in Afghanistan can't spend that year doing something else. The greatest asset the US has built up over the past twenty or so years fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan is a reserve of soldiers with real world military experience. I’m not saying it justifies the cost. Far from it. But it’s not a complete wash from a mid term strategic analysis.
You’re saying a 2-decade war murdering 100,000s of civilians, is “a great asset” and “not a wash from strategic analysis”?
> You’re saying a 2-decade war murdering 100,000s of civilians, is “a great asset” and “not a wash from strategic analysis”?
I'm not finding much of what you claim the poster is "saying", in their post.
Re: Economic costs of war
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Playing devil's advocate because I don't think cost is the main reason we don't have universal healthcare in the US: Bernie Sanders (who is probably the most pro-universal healthcare politician in the US so his numbers might be on the low side) estimated that Medicare For All would cost $3-4 trillion per year. The war in Afghanistan was about 10x cheaper per year.
Healthcare spending is currently $3-4 trillion a year. The important number is the difference between M4A and the status quo, not total spending. The sleazy hacks quoting him intentionally equivocated about this.
How can this be so damn expensive? That's 1,000 a month for every single adult and child in the USA. We must be seriously mismanaging our healthcare.
Re: Economic costs of war
#165Deaths 9/11 2,996 Deaths Covid-19 USA 621,000 207x Lack of understanding of large numbers is a flaw in the human mind we have to figure out how to fix.
Things like 9/11 were easily played over and over again, and generated support for the afghan war in the first place.
In NZ when the terrorists broadcasted the Christchurch mosque shootings on facebook, NZ took action swiftly -- banning most semiautomatic weapons.
When BLM protests showed cops shooting, tasing, and running over people with patrol cars -- those images were more compelling than any story that could have been written.
OTOH, Last year one nursing home in NJ had stacked up 17 bodies during a in a shed during a covid outbreak -- yet none of the gruesomeness was aired. I have not recalled seeing any videos of people falling dead due to a mass shooting in the US, other than maybe blurred out video.
I'm not saying we should or should not see more graphic images, but it seems like self-censorship of the aftermath of violence or tragedy has unintended consequences.
Re: Economic costs of war
#166Deaths 9/11 2,996 Deaths Covid-19 USA 621,000 207x Lack of understanding of large numbers is a flaw in the human mind we have to figure out how to fix.
apples 2,996
oranges 621,000
I dont dispute your numbers at all...I just don't understand your point. They're just such vastly different situations managed by different sets of people for different reasons. The "war on terror" was excessive and over budget, but not 100% uncalled for. There WERE follow up terror attacks that happened(london bombing 2005, madrid bombing 2004, paris bataclan attack, etc) and there were some that were foiled, even if just by luck like the shoe bomber. I agree that Afghanistan went too far, too long and too expensive but what does that have to do with covid?
Re: Economic costs of war
#167To those here riffing on the theme of “this misrepresents the volume and beneficiaries of the transactions involved” - you’re not wrong. Accurate representation of public info like this is a top organisational problem for our species at the moment. But I do think you miss the point, so aptly put by Mr Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a thef…
There is no doubt that a lot has been misspent, trillions almost certainly but let's not be naive and say that it could have magically been spent on "better more sensible things" by the same people who misspent it in the first place (congress) and second let's all appreciate that perhaps 1 or 2 trillion a year, perhaps more, is the cost of western civilization not being immediately stomped out by very bad people like nazi china.
Re: Economic costs of war
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's no shortage of metal, only the price of metal Metal is a non-renewable resource. Cost of extraction does not match market price, more so when unnecessary demand is created for wars. What kind of spin is this?
There's probably more metal in the solar system than the volume of Earth.
Ah yes, technical truth, the best kind of truth.
There could be asteroids of pure palladium, platinum, gold, and silver, and it wouldn't matter a fig until it was cost competitive with digging rocks out of the ground, sticking them on a slow barge to a massive refinery and processing them with cheap, probably exploitative, labor.
Re: Economic costs of war
#169To those here riffing on the theme of “this misrepresents the volume and beneficiaries of the transactions involved” - you’re not wrong. Accurate representation of public info like this is a top organisational problem for our species at the moment. But I do think you miss the point, so aptly put by Mr Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a thef…
I feel this is not as simple as this. It's a nice appeal but very removed from reality. If you didn't have strong enough army to protect you, then you might loose, schools hospitals and what not... Unfortunatly, in a real world a war is not a maybe question but a when question. The question is what amount of defense expenditure is adequate? And that a political question, with no right or wrong answers that for the vo…
What you say is true, but I think people get pissed off when comparing US Military spending vs... basically the entirety of the world
https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison
This is so far beyond overkill it's sickening.
Re: Economic costs of war
#170To those here riffing on the theme of “this misrepresents the volume and beneficiaries of the transactions involved” - you’re not wrong. Accurate representation of public info like this is a top organisational problem for our species at the moment. But I do think you miss the point, so aptly put by Mr Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a thef…
In terms of cutting costs, the way we exited Afghanistan is the best way to do it. Pull out overnight, abandon all the equipment, and the rapid takeover by the Taliban means we don't need to keep running bombing missions to support a slowly retreating national army.
In that regard I'd see the current situation as a success, not a failure. It also seems like the Taliban have chilled out a bit, since we're not seeing widescale reprisals.