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Economic costs of war

watson.brown.edu

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Re: Economic costs of war

#411

Post by SubiculumCode »

lmilcin wrote: post #270
SubiculumCode wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, you are a dick.

At least I am competent dick. I work with financial instruments and risk for largest banks in the world. I am competent to point out you have no idea when you say nobody lends US money because I am calculating risk of that debt as my day job. I am not allowed tell you how much but surprisingly large portion of it.

See and respond to my other post. It seems reasonable to assume that most of the money that was lent to us via the BOND/Treasury ultimately came from fiat money creation via the banks through the fractional reserve system.

Re: Economic costs of war

#412

Post by curation »

foolinaround wrote: post #253

A point no one seems to be making is that the $6.4T - a good amount of it just did not vanish... it just found its way into the employees of the state , the war industrial complex seen in the posh houses around the beltway and beyond... it just did not reach all the Americans... those that made bank will no doubt be incentivized to keep up the charade.. the scary part to me is what they are going to cook up next to k…

We are in it; a cold war with China/Russia.

Re: Economic costs of war

#413

Post by ehsankia »

poorjohnmacafee wrote: post #406
NonContro wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of cutting costs, the way we exited Afghanistan is the best way to do it. Pull out overnight, abandon all the equipment, and the rapid takeover by the Taliban means we don't need to keep running bombing missions to support a slowly retreating national army. In that regard I'd see the current situation as a success, not a failure. It also seems like the Taliban have chilled out a bit, since we're not seeing w…

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 did before.

Re: Economic costs of war

#414

Post by lumost »

robbiemitchell wrote: post #356
mikem170 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presidents can use the power to declare war for political purposes, i.e. start a war after a scandal, or before an election, etc. They can also be bribed, just like the politicians in congress. The constitution grants congress the power to declare war, congress being the representatives of the people of the states. It was never intended that a single person, the president, has the authority to launch an offensive war…

> It was never intended Until we get the big showdown about this in the Supreme Court, both the Executive and Legislative will continue to claim they have ultimate authority here.

In the long run it's unlikely that the Supreme Court is a suitable institution to resolve the growing docket of institutional crises in the US.

Re: Economic costs of war

#415

Post by curation »

User23 wrote: post #185
epistasis wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US prints two kinds of money: 1) dollars, which are subject to inflation and decrease in value over time, and 2) bonds, which accumulate in dollar value over time, usually in front of inflation. So because we spent bonds instead of spending dollars, we can not take their dollar value as the cost, because that's most definitely not what we printed for these.

Not exactly. The Federal Reserve and the US Treasury do a dance where the Treasury tells the Fed how many dollars it needs and then creates notes, bills, and bonds in the desired amount. It then performs a simple asset swap with the Fed to receive reserves in exchange for those bonds. This is slightly obfuscated by the primary dealer auction process, but in extremis the Fed can and will just buy the bonds itself. Thi…

Thank you! The money printer goes brrr meme is dangerously wrong.

Re: Economic costs of war

#416

Post by anyfoo »

sgregnt wrote: post #368
anyfoo wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even going into the issue that we don't have time to "go to college" before this needs to be fixed, what actually is the "college" in your analogy? And the balance is already negative.

Restrictions on pollution would hinder economic development, which in turn would hinder scientific progress, so we will not invent new effective methods to fight pollution. "Debt" is unrestrained economic development, "college" is the research and added economic capacity that comes out of it. And profit are the new methods for removing pollution. But I don't necessarily believe in it. The point here is that, IMHO, fo…

Here is the data I know about, I don't think it's "a populist claim without data": https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/

Re: Economic costs of war

#417

Post by asdff »

bb88 wrote: post #165
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #5

Deaths 9/11 2,996 Deaths Covid-19 USA 621,000 207x Lack of understanding of large numbers is a flaw in the human mind we have to figure out how to fix.

Things like 9/11 were easily played over and over again, and generated support for the afghan war in the first place. In NZ when the terrorists broadcasted the Christchurch mosque shootings on facebook, NZ took action swiftly -- banning most semiautomatic weapons. When BLM protests showed cops shooting, tasing, and running over people with patrol cars -- those images were more compelling than any story that could hav…

It certainly does. Vietnam was the first war with embedded journalists showing the american people live footage of real combat. It was often gruesome. It lead to people protesting in the streets, burning draft cards, fleeing to Canada, and most of all made the Vietnam war into a political quagmire and put pressure on ending it. That sort of coverage of a conflict has noticeably never happened again. Anytime you see footage these days on the news it feels like B rolls or some stock footage of a couple solders walking around the desert or a truck driving along or some far off building exploding. The media hides the reality of war from the American public after seeing how the public has reacted in the past to this content. It's disingenuous, and you end up with kids joining thinking it will be like Call of Duty and coming back home with PTSD and no easy future due to their broken condition.

Re: Economic costs of war

#418

Post by pizzapill »

908B64B197 wrote: post #391
pizzapill wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China and the USA are responsible for roughly half of global Green House Gas emissions. A few years ago China pledged to invest trillions into environmental protection over the next decades. We can only hope that the USA takes similar steps. Both countries can afford it and both have access to know how other countries have build up in this effort.

When you look at who's polluting and who's emissions are on an upward trajectory, there's one obvious country that's actively working against the environment. China's emissions aren't slowing down. Coal is incredibly cheap when there's no carbon tax or emission standards. Comparing the US[1] and China[2], the US has: - Decreasing per capita emissions in the US starting in 1973 (-27%) - A decrease in the countries emi…

There is a lot of headroom until China even reaches US levels of pollution per capita though. The USA is emitting ~2.5x as much GHG per capita than China.

Also China is the workbench of the world, other nations just shift their GHG load there, first and foremost the US.

Re: Economic costs of war

#419

Post by epistasis »

curation wrote: post #415
User23 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly. The Federal Reserve and the US Treasury do a dance where the Treasury tells the Fed how many dollars it needs and then creates notes, bills, and bonds in the desired amount. It then performs a simple asset swap with the Fed to receive reserves in exchange for those bonds. This is slightly obfuscated by the primary dealer auction process, but in extremis the Fed can and will just buy the bonds itself. Thi…

Thank you! The money printer goes brrr meme is dangerously wrong.

User23 is directly describing how the money printer's gears turn in detail, but the gears go brrrr all the same.

Re: Economic costs of war

#420

Post by sgregnt »

mikem170 wrote: post #383
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…

> 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 pe…

Some say, democracy is very bad, yet it is still better than any other alternative. So, for the lack of a better alternative I have only so much data points.

Yes, referendums etc.. could be a reasonable propose, things evolve so maybe one day we will have something of this sort in the US as well. Time will show!

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