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Economic costs of war

watson.brown.edu

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Re: Economic costs of war

#381

Post by thatwasunusual »

hestefisk wrote: post #207

“Medicare for all”, the single payer universal healthcare system in the US, was projected to cost between $16-34T [1] over a decade. I know there are some big questions around the actual cost of US aggression / state terrorism since 9/11 (ie 6.4T vs 2T as per other entries in this thread). A rough 80/20 analysis suggests: * We could have funded free healthcare to roughly one quarter of the US population for 10 years…

> “Medicare for all”, the single payer universal healthcare system in the US, was projected to cost [...]

Are you American?

Re: Economic costs of war

#382

Post by sgregnt »

smegger001 wrote: post #306
sgregnt wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how this relates to what I wrote? Apparently USA voters do think the spending is adequate... or do you have a better way to decide on this? On a tangential: We can also try to compare the cost of 1 mile of subway in NY vs 1 mile in Shanghai. I didn't check but I would assume NY cost would be more than double. Services in US cost a lot. US innovates and a lot of other countries copy... while it seems that Chi…

do they? is there a transparent way to vote against it when both parties big parties support it tacitly if not publicly. I vote third party every election but they never when because they don't have the money that comes from donations of big lobbying industries like military contractors oil pharma etc

Lobbying is only so much effective as the benefits outweigh the damage to a politician. In our tight election cycles the marginal differences are important, I would believe that politicians would jump to grab as much votes as possible to tilt the balance only even slightly. Maybe there is actually more support for large military spending than it appears to you?

Re: Economic costs of war

#383

Post by mikem170 »

sgregnt wrote: post #184
SteveNuts wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure how this relates to what I wrote? Apparently USA voters do think the spending is adequate... or do you have a better way to decide on this? On a tangential: We can also try to compare the cost of 1 mile of subway in NY vs 1 mile in Shanghai. I didn't check but I would assume NY cost would be more than double. Services in US cost a lot. US innovates and a lot of other countries copy... while it seems that Chi…

> Apparently USA voters do think the spending is adequate

I'm not sure how well the federal government reflects the will of the people, given how campaigns are funded here, using means which are illegal in most other countries. Not to mention the gerrymandering, where politicians are choosing voters instead of the other way around. I don't know if the federal government was originally meant to be responsive to the people. That's why there's no facility for the people to directly propose amendments or vote on referendums at the federal level, like there is in other more democratic countries. For a long time state legislators elected members of congress and the president, not the people.

You mentioned U.S. voters... Perhaps it is a good idea to have a national referendum before launching a war. Democracy is a good thing, right? I believe other countries would do this, Switzerland for example. Maybe even go one better, and have a GoFundMe to pay for it. And volunteer soldiers to fight. It would then be interesting to see how many people want to waste their money and lives halfway across the world killing people who just want to be left alone, but are in the way of someone over here making more money.

Re: Economic costs of war

#384

Post by cmrdporcupine »

mjevans wrote: post #319
refurb wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$6.4T over 20 years sounds like a lot of money, but the US spent $3.8T on healthcare in 2019 alone . So all of this money could have sustained the US healthcare system for barely 18 months. https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta...

6.4T / 20 Years ~= 320B for one year Offhand, the entire broadband portion of the budget for the next 5-20 years was 65B. Maybe healthcare lacks effective resource management. I sure as heck know I always hear quoted prices in other first world countries that are far less, often 1/10th of what we pay in the US.

Here in Ontario with our single payer system the health care budget sits at around $60B a year, for a population of ~14M, or per-capita about $4.6k (CAD) per person.

If you extrapolate that out to a nation of 328 million, that's about $1.5T CAD / $1.1T USD a year.

For a larger population comparison, let's use the UK. NHS budget for 2018 was 114B UKP, or ~$158B USD. For a population of about 66 million people, that works out to about $2.4k USD per person per year and about a $775B USD/year budget.

$3.8T a year on health should pay for universal on demand health care for 100% of the population. Crazy that it's not.

Re: Economic costs of war

#385

Post by rjzzleep »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #302
baybal2 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we've thought continually we were dealing with another defeated Japan or defeated Germany --the enemy population would just comply to our wishes, so we kept on thinking we could "turn them into replicas of American government" You though, but you did not did. In both prior cases US ran moderately competent occupation government, and by some accounts one better than their own. The model US followed in Vietnam was no…

Those countries knew they would be treated as equals on the economic world forum, not puppet states for resource extraction. The only remarkable thing is that we treated Japan so well, considering how its fellow far east countries were treated as client states or worse for so long. I think it was latent guilt of using the nuke on them.

That's actually a really interesting point. South Korea was actually steamrolled by the north, because the US made sure they had no independent way of defending themselves. The US pulled in the UNSC to fight on their own in Korea, while the Soviets had built up a strong local military in the North. Taiwan is now incapable to protect its own borders. They even had a nuclear weapons program in response to mainland China which the CIA infiltrated and shut down. Another example of a local military that was just steamrolled by an insurgency was the Iraqi military.

The US has a pretty good track record when it comes to building insurgencies though, remember that the Taliban were built and trained by ISI and the CIA. Iran had islamic groups that the Shah used to silence opposition forces. There's no way their training and equipment wasn't done in coordination with their US partners given how much of a puppet the Shah was. Or take a look at a lot of the groups that were part of the opposition in Syria.

I wonder if there's any analysis why the US has been so good at building and training insurgency groups, but so bad at making local armies to protect their own territorial borders.

Re: Economic costs of war

#386

Post by queuebert »

ivalm wrote: post #175
sgregnt wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We spend more on the military than the next few biggest spenders combined.

Afghanistan spends 3x as much as the US, relative to the size of their economy. Look where it got them.

Re: Economic costs of war

#387

Post by epicureanideal »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #320
new_realist wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

U.S. spends $4T a year on health care (of which $171.8B is spent on research), vs. $320B a year here.

4T? No, more like 1T Here is 2019: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56324 Medicare + Medicaid = 1T.

But these are actual services provided rather than pure R&D.

Re: Economic costs of war

#388

Post by gerash »

The money spent on the military does trickle down to create a set of jobs and funds some research work.

That said, it doesn't seem like the best capital allocation. Spending so much human capital, time and effort on trying to put together metal objects which either shoot bullets or blow up isn't the most useful endeavor esp. when there is not much competition to necessitate the efforts.

Re: Economic costs of war

#389

Post by mulmen »

lmilcin wrote: post #88
mulmen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it owed to other countries?

You borrow money, they want it back with interest. Have you ever borrowed money from mommy for lollipops? She probably didn't want it back, but other countries are not so nice.

I interpreted your comment as claiming all government debt is foreign, which seems surprising. Is domestic debt not a thing?

Re: Economic costs of war

#390

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

markus_zhang wrote: post #276
heresie-dabord wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A nation has to work out its own problems for itself. This point being raised, it is time for the US to spend money on education to support its own democracy.

Nowadays it's already difficult if not impossible. In the age of big data and open manipulation, there is zero incentive for the politicians, corporations and media to promote independent thought for ordinary people, or to put more precisely only independent thoughts that benefit their agendas. The same goes to millions of middle class employees of those entities. They might want to teach independent thoughts to thei…

"They might want to teach independent thoughts to their own kids but other than that they have zero incentive to promote independent thoughts to their customers because it's profit and power that feeds their family."

This point is about the only bright spot in an otherwise grim perspective. Just about everyone, and that appears to include Putin, wants to do well by their kids education-wise. The rest can fuck off and die, but the self-preservation in the sense of preserving genes by teaching the ability to think critically is important enough that at least there is a chance that spiral will hit a bump here and there.

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