Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Economic costs of war

watson.brown.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 618 posts

Re: Economic costs of war

#511

Post by throwawaysea »

mc32 wrote: post #366
dragonwriter wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gulf War One, we went in, did the job and got out. No, we didn't, we were perpetually militarily engaged in Iraq, at a lower level, between the 1991 war and the 2003 war. We weren't occupying or administering Iraq, but we didn't leave, either. > Let's go back to congress needing to authorize wars Both of the long wars started under Bush had Congressional authorization.

>We weren't occupying or administering Iraq, but we didn't leave, either. I mean, we never left Germany or S. Korea, so... Playing big brother to Q8? I'm not mad. Like other countries, we can pick sides and aid whatever side we think has our interest. I'm not interested in intervening with infantry and all the necessary materiel unless it's to defend ourselves from grave danger. Especially avoid stupid the boondoggle…

> Not everyone wants democracy right now.

Have you looked up polls of Afghanistan’s citizens on whether they want a democratic election process, whether they preferred life under the Taliban, etc? They overwhelmingly preferred the state of things under the US’s support and overwhelmingly support democracy. They can’t fight for it because they fear being shot or beheaded by Taliban terrorists. To read their lack of resistance as a rejection of democracy is to deny everyday Afghanis their agency just because they want to survive to see tomorrow.

Re: Economic costs of war

#512

Post by jessaustin »

rayiner wrote: post #472
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.

The U.S. spends among the most on education of any developed country, both in absolute terms and a percentage of GDP. Our education spending is over 6% of GDP: https://waterpedia.wiki/image/education-spending-share-gdp-s... . All of the people involved in these foreign war debacles were highly pedigreed. (Fun fact: the President of Afghanistan, who fled Kabul yesterday, is an Ivy League-educated professor who "litera…

He now has an excellent opportunity to write another book on this topic!

Re: Economic costs of war

#513

Post by jessaustin »

throwawaysea wrote: post #511
mc32 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We weren't occupying or administering Iraq, but we didn't leave, either. I mean, we never left Germany or S. Korea, so... Playing big brother to Q8? I'm not mad. Like other countries, we can pick sides and aid whatever side we think has our interest. I'm not interested in intervening with infantry and all the necessary materiel unless it's to defend ourselves from grave danger. Especially avoid stupid the boondoggle…

> Not everyone wants democracy right now. Have you looked up polls of Afghanistan’s citizens on whether they want a democratic election process, whether they preferred life under the Taliban, etc? They overwhelmingly preferred the state of things under the US’s support and overwhelmingly support democracy. They can’t fight for it because they fear being shot or beheaded by Taliban terrorists. To read their lack of re…

Phone-based polling is a challenge in poorer nations.

Re: Economic costs of war

#514

Post by sk2020 »

minikites wrote: post #355
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's never been a matter of money. We've seen the government can pass multi trillion dollar bills on demand and increase the budget at will. Not without consequences. Contrary to the headlines, we can’t simply print as much money into existence as we want. For example, the actual cost of the war was closer to $2T. The $6.4T number quoted in this headline is the theoretical sum total including interest payments on t…

>Simply passing bills to spend money that we don’t have may get things done, but our children have to pay for it eventually. I always see this argument, but never a deeper reason why. As far as I know, the projections for every developed economy looks like this, is every country going to go bankrupt eventually? If the economy is growing, we can in fact print money with little to no consequence of inflation. The US ca…

Why not round everyone’s bank account up to the nearest $1,000,000,000,000,000? Wouldn’t such unprecedented “stimulus” create unprecedented growth and end poverty forever? Would our newfound quadrillions end scarcity of resources? If not, why not?

Re: Economic costs of war

#515

Post by jessaustin »

someguydave wrote: post #495
titzer wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard for us to admit it. My own journey, after spending 7+ years living abroad, and recently completing a (most epic yet) cross-country roadtrip, it is clear that America is in decline due to generations of mal-investment. We've squandered blood and treasure in quixotic and wrong-headed misadventures and dumped gargantuan amounts of money into nothing but destruction. We've been led by bravado and glory, by crav…

can you convince your side to leave the other side alone?

Fuck sides man what we need here is a little solidarity!

Re: Economic costs of war

#516

Post by cycomanic »

mc32 wrote: post #494
DSingularity wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The western democracies are so pure and noble. Definitely not colonizing, dictator supporting, or war mongering countries.

Apparently you have some advice for the State Department about how to stabilize a place that has lacked stability for centuries, I bet they could use some advice about now.

If the interest was actually stability then there is plenty of advise. The thing is most of the actions of the US are not out of the interest of stability, it's pure economics and political influence. The US has destabilised or overthrown many stable democratic governments for a more US favourable dictator.

Re: Economic costs of war

#517

Post by jessaustin »

ehsankia wrote: post #413
poorjohnmacafee wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen too much to underestimate the MIC, as Afghanistan's hard fall could easily become "the taliban can't run a nation, we must war", as endless wars resume.

Afghanistan will be busy waring itself. For the past 20 years they probably recruited off the fact that dirty Americans were occupying their glorious country. Now that they're gone, it'll be a straight civil war. They'll be too busy attacking each other. Now that the US is gone, the people who blindly followed will realize that the US wasn't the one in the way of their magical muslim Utopia, and life sucks more than…

It's really going to break our hearts when they just have a relatively peaceful and increasingly prosperous nation...

Re: Economic costs of war

#518

Post by throwawaysea »

corey_moncure wrote: post #371
throwawaysea wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What evidence do you have that Afghanistan was due to oil, and not due to the most direct motivations, like Taliban sheltering Al Qaeda (as they still do)? This seems like a conspiracy theory.

On the public face, the politicians talked about t-----ism and A- Q----. Behind the scenes, they're all doing things like this and getting filthy rich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_Energy

What am I supposed to be taking away from that Wikipedia link? The words “Afghanistan” and “war” don’t appear in the article anywhere. It mentions some activity in Israel and that’s it. It feels to me like you’re mentioning a random energy company as a bogeyman, but it doesn’t actually involve any particular malicious activity.

Re: Economic costs of war

#519

Post by sk2020 »

epicureanideal wrote: post #75

Perhaps they should've spent this much on medical research instead. For the same money perhaps we could save a few million people dying of various diseases or cancer. It would take a whole lot of terrorist events to counter the benefits of significant R&D funding for medicine (or maybe a lot of other things).

The dollars the US spends on medical research led to COVID-19, so maybe that’s not the best option.

Re: Economic costs of war

#520

Post by approxim8ion »

hamburgerwah wrote: post #167
el_jay wrote: post #118

To 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…

"western civilization"

Nice to make Nazi talking points while calling someone else Nazis.

Of course, civilization ends at American borders, and everyone else is unclean, barbaric or evil.

Post reply on HN