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Joseph Stiglitz did wonderful research on calculating the staggering financial cost of the Iraq war, estimated at 3 trillion dollars in 2008: https://www.npr.or

Joseph Stiglitz did wonderful research on calculating the staggering financial cost of the Iraq war, estimated at 3 trillion dollars in 2008: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87801279 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=878012... Amazon's market cap is 1.6 trillion to put the 3 trillion figure in context. The financial resources invested in these wars was enormous.

okareaman 6y ago
The thought that always comes to mind for me is this: Doesn't most of that money end up in the pockets of American defense workers and American troops in the form of wages and salaries and could be viewed as a huge public works project? It's not like the money disappeared into Russian or Chinese pockets.
- chungus_khan 6y ago
  I would personally prefer a public works project with fruits that have a little bit more return on them than blowing up Afghani farmers. Plus acquisitions and operations/maintenance eat up much more than personnel costs anyway, and the surplus of that money goes to defense investors (who I personally don't enjoy subsidizing so much).
  - okareaman 6y ago
    Oh agreed, it's terrible in terms of being a public works project. I'd rather put everyone to work building a national high speed rail system.
  - ansible 6y ago
    There was a A Whitney Young video a while back about that. He was going on about "what good are dead Iraqis to me?" basically. And he had a point. Instead of killing people, and destroying their civilization's infrastructure, we could have instead spent that on R&D for our own energy independence. More of that money would have stayed in the country, enriching us all and boosting our own economy rather than producing goods used for destruction. Even not doing R&D, but just putting that money into basic infrastructure in the USA, like roads and bridges, would promote local economic growth.
chungus_khan 6y ago
And that's no accident. "Defense" is a very lucrative industry with a lot of money and power behind making sure those dollars go towards buying toys to destroy schools on the other side of the planet instead of fixing them back home.
protoman3000 6y ago
Interesting to realize how much is possible if there is political will to do it.

okareaman 6y ago

The thought that always comes to mind for me is this: Doesn't most of that money end up in the pockets of American defense workers and American troops in the form of wages and salaries and could be viewed as a huge public works project? It's not like the money disappeared into Russian or Chinese pockets.

chungus_khan 6y ago
I would personally prefer a public works project with fruits that have a little bit more return on them than blowing up Afghani farmers. Plus acquisitions and operations/maintenance eat up much more than personnel costs anyway, and the surplus of that money goes to defense investors (who I personally don't enjoy subsidizing so much).
- okareaman 6y ago
  Oh agreed, it's terrible in terms of being a public works project. I'd rather put everyone to work building a national high speed rail system.
- ansible 6y ago
  There was a A Whitney Young video a while back about that. He was going on about "what good are dead Iraqis to me?" basically. And he had a point. Instead of killing people, and destroying their civilization's infrastructure, we could have instead spent that on R&D for our own energy independence. More of that money would have stayed in the country, enriching us all and boosting our own economy rather than producing goods used for destruction. Even not doing R&D, but just putting that money into basic infrastructure in the USA, like roads and bridges, would promote local economic growth.

chungus_khan 6y ago

And that's no accident. "Defense" is a very lucrative industry with a lot of money and power behind making sure those dollars go towards buying toys to destroy schools on the other side of the planet instead of fixing them back home.

protoman3000 6y ago

Interesting to realize how much is possible if there is political will to do it.