111–120 of 618 posts
It's apples and oranges, but since people love making the comparison, the last 20 years of war would be enough to cover the cost of Medicare for All for... 6 months.
Sure glad my taxes are 55%
Since this is based on US spending I am assuming you are talking about US taxes, in which case, no you are not paying 55% in taxes.
esp if you consider your employer also pays income taxes for the value you generate to the tune of another 20-40%.
But we can’t afford universal healthcare. Edit: Y’all, every other OECD country doesn’t have the healthcare challenges the US has, and they also don’t light trillions of $fiat on fire waging useless wars. You should care how tax dollars are spent.
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.
This is $2T that could have went towards this country’s dismal healthcare system, funding social security, public education, and miscellaneous social programs.
Instead it has went directly to the DoD companies and private military contracting companies. $2T was literally stolen from the American people. This doesn’t even include the costs to support the few Afghan immigrants that we were able to extract and the healthcare towards the veterans that gave their limbs and life to the service.
As an American, I feel sick just thinking about it.
This title is completely wrong. The article estimates the US has accumulated around $2 trillion in war debt as of 2020. It goes on to estimate interest payments will equal $2 trillion by 2030 and $6.4 trillion by 2050.
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).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's really not. If you buy a house with a mortgage, and later sell the house before the note is due, you will not owe the full amount of the accrued interest. Unfortunately the resale value of a secondhand war is very low.
> you will not owe the full amount of the accrued interest Yes, you will. "accrued interest" is "unpaid interest as of the time of ___"; at the moment you sell the house you will have paid all of the interest up to that moment. There's no early-payment penalty on mortgages, as of the last many decades; maybe that's what you mean?
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 theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
In a strictly limited sense, I’d rather get my cross of iron at 66% off than for the full $6.4T. Better yet would be universal healthcare, enough homes to go round, clean, sustainable energy production systems, and bridges that keep on bridging.
Earlier 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not the what, but the how. A terrorist attack on home turf is a slap in the face of every American. Outrage is to be expected.
Patriotism is a sickness that the world would be better without.
Would the taleban take your words to heart?