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Iran War Cost Tracker
121–130 of 486 posts
Re: Iran War Cost Tracker
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
he was saying the state should be paying the school free lunches, what are you on about
I wasn't making a rebuttal.
Re: Iran War Cost Tracker
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given 50 million schoolkids in the US and a cost per meal per child of $4, the current number represents 10 meals. At 1 meal a day that would be 2 school weeks, at 2 meals a day that would be 1 school week.
How many subsidized meals would it represent if you only account for the kids that need one?
Honestly, a lot of these programs become substantially more expensive when you add the bureaucracy and hoops required by means testing. The economics are easier if you just give kids food and skip sorting out whether they deserve it or not.
Re: Iran War Cost Tracker
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
America needs to have never-ending perpetual wars to sustain its own economy. If we woke up tomorrow and there was just world peace, and America got rid of its military budget millions of people would probably instantly lose their jobs. That's the ultimate reason. They could just as easily declare war against Venus and spend hundreds of billions of dollars sending rocks into space and it would have the same net effec…
> America needs to have never-ending perpetual wars to sustain its own economy. People don't realize that the Pentagon has strategically, over decades, invested and distributed its supply and manufacturing needs to every single congressional district. Basically ensuring that any representative that votes against the DoD budget will run afoul of constituents employed in some fashion by the military industrial complex.
The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower, a Republican, warned us about.
Re: Iran War Cost Tracker
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given 50 million schoolkids in the US and a cost per meal per child of $4, the current number represents 10 meals. At 1 meal a day that would be 2 school weeks, at 2 meals a day that would be 1 school week.
2 weeks of meal for every school kid in the US! Can you imagine the scale of this number? 3 days of war vs 2 week of meal for every school kid Now do the math for Afghan war, probably US could have easily cancelled 70% of loan for every college grad, or could've been built large rail network
The Sentinel ICBM project (already at 2x initial budget, and set to balloon further) will be the most expensive project since the interstate freeway system was built.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/02/the-air-forces-new-icb...
So, an all-city high-speed rail network would certainly be achievable for a small fraction of the total US military budget.
Re: Iran War Cost Tracker
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Iran probably wouldn't have blown up the $300m radar installation if we hadn't randomly attacked them.
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History does not say otherwise. The US however has a history of attacking Iran, including murdering 190 people on a civilian flight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
Re: Iran War Cost Tracker
#127Earlier 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.
Everyone except the president is suggesting this will turn into a regional forever war.
It already was a regional forever war. The US just decided to partake in the festivities.
Re: Iran War Cost Tracker
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh wow, I never truly realized it before, but his speech really used to be a lot more coherent across long sentences than it is these days.
People should be able to separate the man from his politics and look at this apolitically. I don't see how anyone can see the way his speech patterns have changed over the years and not conclude that he has had a sharp cognitive decline. It's baffling that we don't talk about it, especially after we just went through this with Biden and had the whole retrospective about how that was ignored. Now here we are doing the…
See, it's okay if it's the person you voted for and he's doing things you like. But when it's someone you didn't vote for and you don't like what he's doing then the cognitive decline is suddenly a huge problem.
Re: Iran War Cost Tracker
#129Re: Iran War Cost Tracker
#130This 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…
The disruption in gas supply will be very short. Weeks, at most. The gulf states will be very happy to see the Islamic Republic gone, they are living in its shadow for a long time now. Now, Ukraine and Israel need very different kinds of support, and things like US withholding intelligence from Ukraine have nothing to do with Israel.
Iran has been bombing production facilities across a bunch of US allies. It's unclear how quickly those will be rebuilt. Also, the US is probably bombing Iranian production, which means countries like China will be looking for additional sources.