101–110 of 486 posts
[flagged]
US has tons of interests in the region. This is just as much for america's benefit as it is for Israel's.
We better get a liberal democratic Iran government out of this. We better remove and halt nuclear powers for the rest of my life. I suppose pick either, and it was successful. My personal polymarket says we wont get either. Trump and Israel ruin their reputation. But reputation matters close to 0 in international relations, which is why they don't care.
This doesn't include generational damage in sentiment: * Europe is in trouble because they can't get gas from Russia, Qatar stopped supplying gas * Japan is in trouble because Middle East supplies its 75% of oil, which is blocked now * Ukraine is in dilemma, because US giving every support to Israel, but not to Ukraine * Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain is asking questions, if US can't defend us and is moving all defensiv…
We better get a liberal democratic Iran government out of this. We better remove and halt nuclear powers for the rest of my life. I suppose pick either, and it was successful. My personal polymarket says we wont get either. Trump and Israel ruin their reputation. But reputation matters close to 0 in international relations, which is why they don't care.
I doubt it. US intervention seems to have a habit of creating weakened nations for its rivals to benefit from. In Iraq's case: Iran and in Iran's case maybe the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Wouldn't some of these costs be present either way? Without a war US would still have aircraft carriers, they would just be floating somewhere else. On the other side, it seems like this is not tracking interceptor costs (presumably due to it being classified), which have certainly been used extensively and are extremely expensive. For that matter i doubt we have a very clear picture of how much ordinance has been us…
This is a fair way to account for the cost, because the assets were procured and personnel hired years ago for just this purpose.
Put another way: we would not need this fleet at all if we did not expect to use it in a manner like this. (For example, Spain did not choose to have this capability and so has not borne a cost of maintaining this option for the preceding decades.) Through that lens, the true cost of this war would involve counting back to before this round of hostilities began.
It's only fair to count _at least_ the "time on task" for all the assets.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes but right now it’s doing this war. It can’t be anywhere else, so the costs are for this deployment specifically.
I think when people are asking about the cost of a war, they are asking about excess costs. How much extra money would be saved if the war didn't happen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've been at this for 2.5 days, and the president is suggesting this could last a month or more. I suspect the long term ROI on free school lunches is going to far exceed that of this war, as well.
The government's job is not to maximize its ROI. For example, (and I make no argument about whether the current situation does this), protecting its citizens is of extreme moral importance, even if it's very very expensive and unlikely to somehow feed back into the economy in a way that recoups the cost long term.
Why is the US at war?
Wouldn't some of these costs be present either way? Without a war US would still have aircraft carriers, they would just be floating somewhere else. On the other side, it seems like this is not tracking interceptor costs (presumably due to it being classified), which have certainly been used extensively and are extremely expensive. For that matter i doubt we have a very clear picture of how much ordinance has been us…
Next time someone asks how we're going to pay for, eg, free school lunches, keep this site in mind.
The question is fundamentally poorly formed, and as a consequence, so is the rebuttal. A state can pay for anything, since it doesn't have to be in a budget surplus. Household budget analogies emerge any time someone wants to limit spending, or criticize spending, but one of the biggest points of Wealth of Nations (which is the foundation for modern macroeconomics) is that the budget of a state is fundamentally diffe…