25 ms·

Economic costs of war

666 points by hncurious 5y ago

harry8 5y ago
This is why the military industrial complex hates Wikileaks so very much. When the population knows the truth from source documents that cut through lies they really, really don't like the racket. Asssange is still being prosecuted on charges that seem more than just a little spurious.
Grakel 5y ago
There isn't an "opportunity cost" as the article discusses, there's no evidence that Congress would have spent that money on something else. It doesn't sit in an account and then they allocate it, they make it up on paper and then try (and fail) to cover it later.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Ignore money. Think in terms of stuff. Metal that gets put into Humvees can't be put into something else. We threw away an insane amount of stuff. And think in terms of people. People that spend a year as soldiers in Afghanistan can't spend that year doing something else. We threw an insane amount of people-time, and a tragically insane amount of people. There is an opportunity cost in terms of both stuff and people. We can print money, but we can't print stuff or people.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Gravey 5y ago
    > Think in terms of stuff. Metal that gets put into Humvees can't be put into something else. We threw away an insane amount of stuff. Much of that stuff has actually found itself in the hands of those it was made to fight against. This is significantly worse than throwing it away in my opinion.
    - Grakel 5y ago
      But much of the money went to American businesses and jobs. The stuff itself can easily be replaced.
      - Sharlin 5y ago
        You might want to familiarize yourself with the broken window fallacy.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - koolba 5y ago
    > People that spend a year as soldiers in Afghanistan can't spend that year doing something else. The greatest asset the US has built up over the past twenty or so years fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan is a reserve of soldiers with real world military experience. I’m not saying it justifies the cost. Far from it. But it’s not a complete wash from a mid term strategic analysis.
    - Grakel 5y ago
      Sadly it would be a big problem if we went 20 years without a war, the military would be greatly deteriorated.
    - Johnny555 5y ago
      The greatest asset the US has built up over the past twenty or so years fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan is a reserve of soldiers with real world military experience. The average term of enlistment in the USA military is 15 years, 11 years for officers. So that experience gets lost quickly unless we keep getting embroiled in new wars.
      - hn8788 5y ago
        There's no way the average term of enlistment is 15 years. Very few people choose to re-enlist after their first term, or are even allowed to. In 2016, there were almost 200k Marines, and they were struggling to get 10k people to re-enlist after their first 4 years[1]. https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2015/10/12/first-term-marines-are-slow-to-sign-on-for-another-enlistment/ https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2015...
        Johnny555 5y ago
        I just used the snippet returned a Google search, which said: The average length of enlistment for U.S. military personnel is just under 15 years for all branches. The average service time for officers is a bit less, averaging about 11 years. The U.S. Air Force has an average enlistment time of 14.7 years. Oct 4, 2017 The referenced URL is: https://classroom.synonym.com/beyonce-curls-8729.html https://classroom.synonym.com/beyonce-curls-8729.html (yes, that "beyonce-curls" URL is the right one) Surprisingly, it does include references, but only one of them still exists, which backs up the 11 year number for officers, but not for general enlisted: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2011/10/05/chapter-6-a-profile-of-the-modern-military/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2011/10/05/chapter... The average officer in 2009 had been in the military nearly 11 years, slightly more than a year longer than the average in 1973. The pattern among enlisted personnel is more complicated. The average length of service for enlisted personnel rose from 5.8 years in 1973 to a peak of 7.5 in 1994 and 1996, but then began drifting downward and now stands at 6.7 years.
  - babesh 5y ago
    Blood, toil, tears, and sweat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood,_toil,_tears_and_sweat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood,_toil,_tears_and_sweat
  - Grakel 5y ago
    Absolutely not. Waste fuels the economy. There's no shortage of metal, only the price of metal. As for people, spending a couple of years in the military is much better personal development for many young people than going to college at an age when most people can't appreciate it. These things aside, of course the loss of life is horrific and a terrible waste.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      1 in 5 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are diagnosed with PTSD. And veterans account for 20 percent of U.S. suicides. https://facethefactsusa.org/facts/the-true-price-of-war-in-human-terms/ https://facethefactsusa.org/facts/the-true-price-of-war-in-h...
    - kortex 5y ago
      On the other hand, college was tough, but didn't kill/maim/disfigure/traumatize me.
    - Sharlin 5y ago
      > Waste fuels the economy. Yeah, and see what mess that sort of thinking has got us into. Economic growth is worthless if it’s not sustainable.
    - yunohn 5y ago
      > 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?
      - Grakel 5y ago
        There's probably more metal in the solar system than the volume of Earth.
        yunohn 5y ago
        I guess this kind of retort would help you in a pub quiz.
- onelastjob 5y ago
  You can only print so much money though before the dollar becomes worthless, so there is an opportunity cost since you can't print infinite dollars
  - dlp211 5y ago
    Except we don't just print money and give it away. The money is borrowed (backed by some asset), and this distinction matters. IOW, the money that gets printed is (generally) non-inflationary. Stop using what you learned in your Econ 1XX level courses to try and reason about government spending and money operations, especially, US government spending and money operations. What you learned is not applicable.
    - onelastjob 5y ago
      Seems like inflation is skyrocketing to me. Specifically asset inflation. Housing prices, stocks, bitcoin, etc. Basically dollar becoming worth less against these assets thanks to QE.
      - valzam 5y ago
        House prices are a real issue, although I don't think that's only because of increased money supply. Otherwise, does it matter? What's the impact on ordinary people if bitcoin is worth 100 or 1 mio dollars? Notwithstanding the fact that the number of people actively buying financial assets has gone up a lot in recent years, which is bound to increase prices.
      - sneak 5y ago
        Dollars being worth less is obviously true. The well-defined link to this being a result of QE is less clear. I keep hearing that it's supply shortages due to covid and wage increases due to unemployment aid. Who knows if that is true, either.
      - dlp211 5y ago
        There is no such thing as asset inflation. If the price of assets is going up, then they are going up. It sucks that housing is considered an asset (it shouldn't, it should be a consumable) but that is the long and short of it. And you can't have an average 2% inflation target and underperform that target for a decade+, then complain when there is inflation above 2%(which is transitory and caused by simultaneous demand and supply shocks due to covid).
- Retric 5y ago
  The simplest way to look at it is the national debt would be 22.6T instead of 28.6T. That’s one option where nothing changes except war or no wars. Many people say national debt has zero impacts but eventually nobody is going to be lending the US money if we don’t pay our debt, which one way or another leads to a world of hurt. However, to get that debt we needed to borrowing money from someone and agree to pay them interest. We could have also browned the same money and lowered taxes, or borrowed the same money and had free universal healthcare or whatever other government spending we wanted. That’s what opportunity cost means.
  - Grakel 5y ago
    We're never going to pay it, and no we couldn't have gotten universal healthcare. If they had the votes, they would have done both, regardless of cost. They don't have the votes for universal healthcare.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Running out of people willing to lend us money is the ultimate risk. The more we borrow the sooner that happens.
      - mulmen 5y ago
        You mean the more we don’t pay back? Carrying debt generally increases credit rating.
        deleted 5y ago
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        Retric 5y ago
        Only up to a point, try borrowing say 50 million dollars while making 50k. Before lending money people look at your existing debt load to determine if your likely to pay it back. The same thing happens to countries, though more smoothly as they first require higher interest rates.
- yunohn 5y ago
  > there's no evidence that Congress would have spent that money on something else “Reality is unchangeable, so we can’t know the unknown” So what? It definitely could’ve been spent better than decade’s killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.
  - Grakel 5y ago
    You don't get it. It couldn't have been spent on something else. If the day before 9/11 Congress had passed universal healthcare, free college, and basic income, they still would have spent this money on a war. Are you saying they could have said, oh we got attacked, let's estimate the cost of a war and put it into healthcare?
    - yunohn 5y ago
      No, I’m saying the USA didn’t need to make it a multi-decade war, killing civilians while they were at it.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
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.
- techrat 5y ago
  Ah yes, but Haliburton couldn't spend money on a 'war against mask wearing', so they were the true victims here. /s, of course. It's been obvious early on that the whole motive for our ratfucking of the middle east had nothing to do with the "WMDs" nor 9/11... lest we would have not gone under false pretenses, actually had gone after the country who financed the ones who flew the planes, nor remained as long as we had after Bin Laden was found. Instead we spent more money than had ever been spent before on one thing in our country's history... but on another country. That money went somewhere. Defense contractors. Meanwhile, infrastructure all across the US is derelict. Case in point, 47,000+ bridges in the US are now considered 'structurally deficient.' https://www.npr.org/2019/04/05/710364158/report-finds-more-than-47-000-structurally-deficient-bridges-in-the-u-s https://www.npr.org/2019/04/05/710364158/report-finds-more-t... Bin Laden himself said what his end goal was. > "We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy," bin Laden said in a taped statement. Only the smallest sign of al-Qaida would "make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations." The article this quote was pulled from is from 2011. So, for at LEAST TEN YEARS, we knew the explicit goal was to prolong an unwinnable war in order to bleed the country dry. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/the-cost-of-bin-laden-3-trillion-over-15-years/238517/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/the-cos... Why couldn't these defense contractors be paid to bring things up to snuff here instead of pissing it away on a 'war against terror' that we had no hope to win? Bin Laden got what he wanted in the end.
- runawaybottle 5y ago
  Some related numbers for just Afghanistan: American service members killed in Afghanistan through April: 2,448. U.S. contractors: 3,846. Afghan national military and police: 66,000. Other allied service members, including from other NATO member states: 1,144. Afghan civilians: 47,245. Taliban and other opposition fighters: 51,191. Aid workers: 444. Journalists: 72. https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-business-afghanistan-43d8f53b35e80ec18c130cd683e1a38f https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-business-afghanistan-... ——— It’s funny, over 60k Afghan police/military died, and our plan was to arm 300k of them and hope they like perpetual war against the Taliban. Yeah, I think they did a hard pass on that one and just wanted it all to stop.
jaggederest 5y ago
Approximately $20,000 per person. $1000 a year would have made a nice universal basic income for the last 20 years.
- marricks 5y ago
  Sure, but you can't discount all the US jobs created for defense industry and mercenary corps /s
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    UBI would have generated those same jobs with new consumption! :) Just you know, jobs in service of productive things, and the Halliburtons might actually have to, gasp, compete.
  - js2 5y ago
    I know you're being sarcastic, but it's pretty widely agreed for a very long time that defense spending is an inefficient way to create jobs. Here's an article from 1983: https://www.nytimes.com/1983/10/16/jobs/defense-spending-its-effect-on-jobs.html https://www.nytimes.com/1983/10/16/jobs/defense-spending-its... > According to the study, for every $1 billion spent by the Pentagon to buy goods and services, 28,000 jobs are created in the private sector. The same investment would create 32,000 jobs if spent on public transportation, 57,000 if used for personal consumption and 71,000 jobs if spent on education, the report contended.
- deleted 5y ago
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- lucb1e 5y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that wages are quite inflated in the USA and $1000/year is not a livable income (i.e. sufficient for cheap housing, cheap food, water, electricity, basic appliances like a fridge and washing machine, heating, and pretty much nothing else) even in Europe where I'm from. Or am I missing the point of a UBI?
  - 5y ago
toomuchtodo 5y ago
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.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Not with the current system. $6.4T over 20 years = $340B/yr. The US spends 2x that per year just for medicare, which only covers approximately 20% of the population.
  - mrleinad 5y ago
    Not everyone has to use it, private and public systems can coexist, as it works in many countries.
    - Vecr 5y ago
      That's not M4A then, that's public option. M4A bans all other insurance (apparently? I don't know if there are multiple "versions") for collective bargaining reasons.
    - oh_sigh 5y ago
      Sure, but would you consider 30% coverage from the government to be "universal healthcare"? Because that's what you get for $900B/yr. And we already have a public/private mix of healthcare with medicare/medicaid/ACA/workplace offered healthcare. That system, today, covers 90% of the population.
      - mrleinad 5y ago
        I'm not so clear on how that works in the states. Here in Argentina you have a public system that everyone can use. Now, if you want, you can pay for private healthcare and use that if you think it's better, but the public system is still available even then, and there are no limits to what it covers. The public system doesn't care if you can pay it or not, or even if you're a national or a foreigner. Just walk in, show some ID, and you can use it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jonthepirate 5y ago
Sure glad my taxes are 55%
- dlp211 5y ago
  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.
  - CptJamesCook 5y ago
    37% federal, 13.3% california = 50.3 Most wealthy people spend another 1-2% of their income on property taxes and a bit on sales taxes, etc. I estimate I pay 53% of my income to taxes. I agree that 55% is unlikely tho
    - vaidhy 5y ago
      The federal rate is progressive and not on the entire income. 37% applies only on the taxable income above $518K. Why is this misrepresentation?
      - pessimizer 5y ago
        I spent an hour arguing about taxes with someone until I realized that they didn't understand how marginal taxes worked. I bet you dollars to donuts that if you start talking about taxes in a room full of upper-middle class people, one will tell you about people choosing not to earn more money so they don't get "bumped" into a higher tax rate.
    - tuxoko 5y ago
      You don't pay 37% federal. 37% is only for the top bracket.
    - flowerbeater 5y ago
      The 37% and 13.3% are on marginal income, as I'm sure you know. The effective tax rate is much lower. California and some other states also have required disability insurance that is taken out with the state income tax. It's 1% in CA. And I would count Social Security and Medicare too, equally 7.65%. But the SS part has a cap so the percentage goes down the more you make. All put together, someone making $250K pays about 37% on that to various income taxes listed above. If you were making 1M income a year, that rises to 47%. For 100K, it's about 30%.
throwthere 5y ago
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.
- OJFord 5y ago
  If you buy a house with a mortgage, I think it's reasonable to say you 'spent' the booked value.
  - slacktide 5y ago
    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.
    - OJFord 5y ago
      Of course you do, you're just typically rolling it into another mortgage on the next place. Anyway I didn't say and didn't mean it's the only valid interpretation of 'spent', just that it is one.
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        No, you don't. You might in a state of nature, but the US has laws against prepayment penalties for mortgages. (Well, against the mortgage originator charging prepayment penalties.) You don't owe interest until it accrues.
        OJFord 5y ago
        Right, you 'owe the full amount of accrued interest'... Which is not as much as the amount that would've accrued if held to term. I think this is rather beside the point anyway!
lmilcin 5y ago
Nah... probably large portion of this was paid to US corporations and citizens. Spending on the level of government is counterintuitive. If you are government you hand out money but it gets back to you. Unfortunately, interest on that debt is real and is owed to other countries.
- mulmen 5y ago
  How is it owed to other countries?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    You borrow money, they want it back with interest. Have you ever borrowed money from mommy for lollipops? She probably didn't want it back, but other countries are not so nice.
    - mulmen 5y ago
      I interpreted your comment as claiming all government debt is foreign, which seems surprising. Is domestic debt not a thing?
  - slacktide 5y ago
    Because they are the ones who lent the US the money. China is the #2 holder of US treasury bonds and currently own about 1T worth. (4% of the US national debt) Japan is the #1 holder at 1.2T. Source: https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt
    - SubiculumCode 5y ago
      No one "lent" us money. It's a fiat currency with a self-imposed limit on new money creation.
markus_zhang 5y ago
Well good job for the boys and girls who managed to grab bucks and power through all those mess then.
baybal2 5y ago
Clinton Bill made the impossible, and balanced US budget, and Bush George very much intentionally, and purposefully undid it
epicureanideal 5y ago
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).
- new_realist 5y ago
  U.S. spends $4T a year on health care (of which $171.8B is spent on research), vs. $320B a year here.
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    4T? No, more like 1T Here is 2019: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56324 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56324 Medicare + Medicaid = 1T.
    - tick_tock_tick 5y ago
      This is federal only. Still don't think it will get up to 4 trillion but linking to federal only is a bit misleading.
    - epicureanideal 5y ago
      But these are actual services provided rather than pure R&D.
- bamboozled 5y ago
  Climate change will destabilize the world more than any "terrorists" could. Also would've been nice to have seen 6.4 trillion go into renewables tech and investments ~ 20 years ago.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    $6.4T into renewables and storage over the past 20 years would have decarbonized the US grid several time over, accelerated the tech curve drastically, nearly completely transitioned us to EVs, and we'd probably have decarbonized a good chunk of industry that is hard to decarbonize now. We'd have cheaper energy than we do today, and cheaper energy forever. We could have been looking at current levels of climate change, instead of the far far bigger changes that we are now going to experience. And why did we spend so much on these countries? It all comes back to oil and the fear of losing access to oil to power the economy. We really should never forgive those who work for the fossil fuel industry for putting us on this timeline with their active deceipt, lies, and massive propaganda campaign. There should be no forgiveness for what they have cost us.
trentnix 5y ago
And a sizable portion of the population believes the government should take on more responsibility, as if those outcomes will be better somehow. It’s Gell-Mann amnesia of another kind.
legitster 5y ago
Without their bizarre accounting, the actual number is closer to $2T spent. 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.
- cochne 5y ago
  Why do you say the number is closer to $2T? I found this nice graphic, could you point out what is wrong or bizarre about it? https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2019/budgetary-costs-post-911-wars-through-fy2020-64-trillion https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2019/budgetary-c...
xyst 5y ago
Given the current state of Afghanistan, the return on investment is definitely not worth it. Our grandchildren will be paying for this debt. 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.
- SubiculumCode 5y ago
  A debt denominated in a fiat currency AND we might have spent 2T on the wards, but the full accounting has to include the full cost benefits of those expenditures, some of which could have been positive (in terms of financials).
- _RPL5_ 5y ago
  "This doesn’t even include the costs... " that the locals paid. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/ https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/ I am sure Brown exaggerates the number of people killed and displaced, but even a conservative estimate is probably a pretty large number.
  - hack-news 5y ago
    Americans literally don't care about how many people they've killed, only if it was too expensive to do so. HN used to just flag these discussions, now given the situation this one will stand for a while and the sentiment will momentarily be more reasonable, but just wait for the next terrorist attack for all these American morons to lose their minds and commit further atrocities.
el_jay 5y ago
To those here riffing on the theme of “this misrepresents the volume and beneficiaries of the transactions involved” - you’re not wrong. Accurate representation of public info like this is a top organisational problem for our species at the moment. 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.
- Smoosh 5y ago
  I think of this when people say we can't afford to mitigate climate change.
  - api 5y ago
    If climate change were being caused by communists or Islamists to attack America we would have converted to post-carbon by now. Human adversity pushes buttons in our brain stem that natural processes or random threats do not.
  - robomartin 5y ago
    It isn't that we can't afford to mitigate climate change. We cannot mitigate climate change, period. In other words, you could throw all the money on the planet at it and it would not make a dent. No purported solution passes the math and physics tests. It's easy to make a mess. This can be done with very little energy, resources and time. On the other hand, cleaning-up the mess takes far more energy, time and resourced than what went into creating it in the first place. That's the problem. We don't have it. Energy, resources or time. You are far more likely to kill everything on this planet than to fix climate change.
newman314 5y ago
Two words. Universal healthcare. The money is there but the will is not.
- gjs278 5y ago
  two words. basic math. look up how much universal healthcare actually costs. 6.4t will not cover it for 20 years.
pfdietz 5y ago
If a human life has a statistical value of $9M (the value used in determining if a federal safety regulation is justified), this is 700K lives.
jeffbee 5y ago
The little fact I keep in my mind on this topic is for a fraction of this cost the USA could have simply purchased all of non-urbanized Canada, and this would surely have been a far better investment.
hestefisk 5y ago
“Medicare for all”, the single payer universal healthcare system in the US, was projected to cost between $16-34T [1] over a decade. I know there are some big questions around the actual cost of US aggression / state terrorism since 9/11 (ie 6.4T vs 2T as per other entries in this thread). A rough 80/20 analysis suggests: * We could have funded free healthcare to roughly one quarter of the US population for 10 years (see [1]) * We could have funded free medication for all US citizens for 20 years (assuming US spends an average $1100/yr per patient, approx double of other countries [2], viz a biz the estimated spend of $1K USD / yr per US citizen spent over 20 years on aggression since 9-11 mentioned above) * … I quite like the following quote by Noam Chomsky on US international terror in Afghanistan (and Nicaragua, Iraq, Sudan and many other places): “ The U.S. is officially committed to what is called “low–intensity warfare.” That’s the official doctrine. If you read the definition of low–intensity conflict in army manuals and compare it with official definitions of “terrorism” in army manuals, or the U.S. Code, you find they’re almost the same. Terrorism is the use of coercive means aimed at civilian populations in an effort to achieve political, religious, or other aims. That’s what the World Trade Center bombing was, a particularly horrifying terrorist crime. And that’s official doctrine. I mentioned a couple of examples. We could go on and on. It’s simply part of state action, not just the U.S. of course.” [3] It sums up the meaninglessness quite well. [1] https://www.crfb.org/blogs/how-much-will-medicare-all-cost https://www.crfb.org/blogs/how-much-will-medicare-all-cost [2] https://data.oecd.org/healthres/pharmaceutical-spending.htm#indicator-chart https://data.oecd.org/healthres/pharmaceutical-spending.htm#... [3] https://monthlyreview.org/2001/11/01/the-united-states-is-a-leading-terrorist-state/ https://monthlyreview.org/2001/11/01/the-united-states-is-a-...
- nightski 5y ago
  It's never been a matter of money. We've seen the government can pass multi trillion dollar bills on demand and increase the budget at will. That's what is lacking, the political power/will to pass such legislation. It's unfortunate but it has nothing to do with this war or its cost.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > It's never been a matter of money. We've seen the government can pass multi trillion dollar bills on demand and increase the budget at will. Not without consequences. Contrary to the headlines, we can’t simply print as much money into existence as we want. For example, the actual cost of the war was closer to $2T. The $6.4T number quoted in this headline is the theoretical sum total including interest payments on the debt well into the future. Simply passing bills to spend money that we don’t have may get things done, but our children have to pay for it eventually. Even cheap debt must still be serviced. A significant portion of your tax bill every year goes to servicing interest on national debt. So no, it’s not simply a matter of political will to spend all the money we want. There are limits.
steve76 5y ago
Now liberals care about money, when it suits their brutal ambition, and use the defeat they sabotaged as an argument for money and power. If liberals want money, wake up for real and kill everyone and steal their land. They're doing it to you. Do it back to them. It's the choice of least violence. Leave them alone, they kill you, then turn inward and kill each other. When humans misbehave and betray their own nature, everything becomes a weapon. Every trade, every product, every paycheck. There's demand not to be horribly murdered, the greatest demand of them all. There is zero demand for mythical medical treatments we don't have or problems a century away whose modern solutions are all painfully corrupt. If there was demand, they would exist. Those good things only come about because people tearing each other apart see the good in them and stop fighting for a moment to seek them. If your plans involve making tolerable the act of being horribly murdered, I suggest you rethink them please. Here's a stimulus check. Stand by to be thrown into a volcano. Liberals love the Taliban. They see themselves in them. They look a lot alike when they want power. No rules to restrain them. Leadership hating their followers. Selfishness. Fooling themselves they know everything. Cowardliness to dare not offend the next rung up on the ladder. Celebrity and identity as the only qualification to lead. If you were out to destroy America, with it's requirements of self-evidence and inalienable rights, what would you do different? I can't tell anymore.
SevenSigs 5y ago
$6.4T AKA $6,400,000,000,000 ... I wonder how much was the cost for killing 1 person https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKrFFFpYgkU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKrFFFpYgkU dang... flagged already
foolinaround 5y ago
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 keep the dollars flowing...
- symlinkk 5y ago
  I’ve never heard of “posh houses in the beltway” that are owned by people involved in defense, yet you and another poster both brought this up. Is this actually a thing?
  - colordrops 5y ago
    Yes, my cousin lives in one. He used to be a soldier that went on several tours in the region, then transitioned to a private job in the industry that made him wealthy.
  - ip26 5y ago
    DC property is very expensive. Average home price is over a million. SF is probably worse, but that isn’t really the point.
  - imgabe 5y ago
    Northern Virginia, and the areas of MD to the northwest of DC are very, very affluent.
- curation 5y ago
  We are in it; a cold war with China/Russia.
- sreeramb93 5y ago
  Yes this is it. American taxpayer money went to americans mostly and some of its allies. 6.4T just did not go to poor communities of color.
new_realist 5y ago
Total U.S. assets amount to about $225 trillion. Spending 1/700th of that per year for the past 20 years to protect those assets seems a reasonable investment.
- wonwars 5y ago
  While in principle you're right, I hope you realise that the Iraq work was fake and Obama chose to not pull out of Afghanistan even when laden was dead
sonicggg 5y ago
The USA wasted 1 trillion just in that dumpster called Afghanistan, only to see its biggest rival, China, be the only one to secure mining rights with the Taliban. They really learned nothing from recent history. This was a major defeat in the geopolitical chess game.
rdevsrex 5y ago
A staggering sum, but not surprising. I wonder how the last 20 years would have played out if we reacted to 9/11 with humility and soul searching instead of jingoism. I mean, the blowback in the Middle East didn’t come out of nowhere. Hopefully we will learn from this and back to walking softly.
_trampeltier 5y ago
As we did learn last year with Irene Triplett, the last person who got money from the us civil war, a war is not over, when no gun does shot. For many, many years pension has to be paid. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/10/irene-triplett-last-civil-war-pensioner-73-monthly-dies/5333830002/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/10/irene-t...
webwielder2 5y ago
How much would it cost to make the US carbon neutral? Or cure one of the top 10 terminal illnesses/conditions?
wonwars 5y ago
What (and when) were the last three wars where America "won" , meaning fulfill honest objectives in spirit. E.g. Iraq-2003 doesn't count because (1) , objecties weren't honest, you cannot destroy wmd's that didn't exist and (2) the spirit was acclaimed to be elimination of terrorism and it's well known that not only has the situation deteriorated, America funded al Qaeda in that region.
poof131 5y ago
Having spent a decade involved with the military, both big (as a Navy fighter pilot) and small (a tour in Baghdad assisting special forces), I’m disgusted by the waste, destructiveness, and ineffectiveness of these wars. Some of the events that stick in my memory: In 2007, Marine prowler pilots ran it up the chain of command that they were having “zero” effects stopping IEDs in Iraq. They were told to shut up and keep flying the missions even though ground forces would turn off their “effective” vehicle jammers thinking the planes provided support. My friend, flying an F-18, found insurgents shooting rockets at a base, and instead of using a laser or gps guided bomb to take out the threat, he was told to spot for artillery, which preceded to miss the target on multiple shots until the enemy drove away. One of the more effective planes that JSOC leveraged was the super tucano, that could fly at $600 per flight hour versus $10k for an F-18, and also do a better job. Big Navy and Air Force joined together to shut down the program trying to expand its usage. The massive number of contractors in Baghdad, driving around brand new F-350s. Getting paid ungodly sums of money next to their poorly paid military counterparts. Ex-pilots getting paid $20k+ a month for a job I’d happily have done instead of my near meaningless ground-tour job. The SF guys complaining about their “support” contractors getting paid $1k a day and taking none of the risks. Patraeus having a peace deal with Sadr that said US troops wouldn’t enter Sadr City, but of course, all the attacks started being launched from there. So he wanted SF to go in with their Iraq counterparts, not on official orders, but just from a phone call, and not to file a secret after-action report, all so he could claim plausible deniability. An awesome SF captain said “fuck that” and his leadership agreed, telling the general he could provide the order over a phone call but they wouldn’t stop filing after-action reports. I remember Tailhook and all the admirals, McCain, and CEOs of leading contractors all schmoozing it up. Proceeding to build planes and weapons the operators didn’t want: one plane to do everything (JSF), a crapy Navy ATFLIR (when the Sniper was better). Topgun instructors were ordered not to talk about deploying Sniper pods on F-18s. I’m sure some of the admirals are probably on the board of directors now. The level of grift in senior leadership is just amazing. What an embarrassing moment for the talking heads and leaders of our national security apparatus. Afghanistan should never have been more than SF and airpower. And the Iraq war never should have been. We can’t build nations with the military. But once a war starts, everyone wants to play because it’s the money spigot. Not too different from large civilian orgs. But really this is all our fault. I remember sitting in a palace on a hill in Baghdad, in an SF operations center, watching a wall-full of flatscreen displays, with predator feeds of young SF soldiers risking their lives, next to talking heads screaming about the developing financial crisis. Seeing the massive outcry and response to the stock market crashing, I realized the wars were just a tv show and didn’t really matter. No one cared, especially compared to their pocketbook. And once I got out in 2011, I didn’t pay much attention myself either. But I do vote now for politicians who talk about reducing the US military presence abroad and view with disgust fake hawks who’ve never served but are happy to send others to war for American prestige. And good on Biden for finally pulling the plug even if the execution bordered on incompetence. There probably really wasn’t another option. Listen to the generals who’d say “stay, we can’t give up”…. the endless graft. A sad time for many of the Afghan people. /rant.
rcurry 5y ago
Whatever. We have all these online sites where we can do battle over politics. Can’t we keep HN as a fun place to talk about tech stuff?
- minikites 5y ago
  Everything is political, technology is incredibly political.
tick_tock_tick 5y ago
That seems unbelievable cheap for 20 years of war?
- asdff 5y ago
  Keep in mind our opponents were farmers and herders who took up found weaponry. I wonder what their end of the bill looks like. Probably not 6.4 trillion.
minikites 5y ago
Imagine if we spent that money on a new version of the Marshall Plan and created new markets for our economy. Instead we bomb and shoot people for no reason and create a generation of people who hate us.
jeffrogers 5y ago
Whatever the number, the privacy costs and the downstream implications are significantly higher. Who knows where that will all end...
gerash 5y ago
The money spent on the military does trickle down to create a set of jobs and funds some research work. That said, it doesn't seem like the best capital allocation. Spending so much human capital, time and effort on trying to put together metal objects which either shoot bullets or blow up isn't the most useful endeavor esp. when there is not much competition to necessitate the efforts.
duxup 5y ago
I remember when Bush Jr's big campaign promise was "no nation building". And then we got ultra nation building. Maybe he should have listened to himself?
curation 5y ago
The West is an itinerant war machine. We define who we are, prove our ethics via an Other we best. The only solution is Copernican.
Coneylake 5y ago
Doesn't most of this money go back to paying American soldiers and so most of this money goes back into the American economy?
gdsdfe 5y ago
I wonder how much of that went to the pocket of members of the Bush administration. They had big interests in various DOD suppliers.
andyxor 5y ago
how much would it cost to terraform Mars
fractal618 5y ago
My therapist says I shouldn't read stuff like this anymore because it upsets me too much.
busymom0 5y ago
There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. - smedley butler War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. - smedley butler War is just a racket... I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. - smedley butler Major General Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 – June 21, 1940), nicknamed "Old Gimlet Eye",[1] was a senior United States Marine Corps officer who fought in both the Mexican Revolution and World War I. During his 34-year career as a Marine, he participated in military actions in the Philippines, China, and Central America; the Caribbean during the Banana Wars; and France in World War I. Butler was, at the time of his death, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. By the end of his career, Butler had received 16 medals, five for heroism. He is one of 19 men to receive the Medal of Honor twice, one of three to be awarded both the Marine Corps Brevet Medal (along with Wendell Neville and David Porter) and the Medal of Honor, and the only Marine to be awarded the Brevet Medal and two Medals of Honor, all for separate actions. In 1933, he became involved in a controversy known as the Business Plot, when he told a congressional committee that a group of wealthy industrialists were planning a military coup to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with Butler selected to lead a march of veterans to become dictator, similar to fascist regimes at that time. The individuals involved all denied the existence of a plot, and the media ridiculed the allegations, but a final report by a special House of Representatives Committee confirmed some of Butler's testimony. Butler later became an outspoken critic of American wars and their consequences. In 1935, Butler wrote a book titled War Is a Racket, where he describes and criticizes the workings of the United States in its foreign actions and wars, such as those in which he had been involved, including the American corporations and other imperialist motivations behind them. I would highly recommend the audiobook of his book from 1920s: Warning from 1920s: WAR IS A RACKET by Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler - FULL AudioBook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26O-2SVcrw0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26O-2SVcrw0
soheil 5y ago
It’s so odd that people treat this as if that money has evaporated. It was spent by the US in the US. I don’t know any billionaire defense contractors but I could be wrong. That means the money was spent on workers and equipment. The former creates jobs the later pushes our envelope of technological know-how forward, think DARPA => internet. Lastly the dollar is the world reserve currency. We’re not really paying for every dollar we spend, there is a lot of leverage we have in deciding what countries get to pay what portion of each dollar we borrow. To fight this, is the main reason euro was created and why the European Union came to be. Last I checked Eurozone is not doing so well economically.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
What about the social costs? Vietnam was the start of American mistrust of government. Now soldiers and their families are learning that all the suffering was meaningless. I’m surprised people still sign up for the military.
SevenSigs 5y ago
The cost of Afghan war: $6.4T... the number killed: 51000... cost per death? $125.5M
Borrible 5y ago
Who in his right mind, would mind the costs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion
Abu975mr22 5y ago
Gf
Abu975mr22 5y ago
Gds

666 points by hncurious 5y ago

This is why the military industrial complex hates Wikileaks so very much. When the population knows the truth from source documents that cut through lies they really, really don't like the racket. Asssange is still being prosecuted on charges that seem more than just a little spurious.

Grakel 5y ago

There isn't an "opportunity cost" as the article discusses, there's no evidence that Congress would have spent that money on something else. It doesn't sit in an account and then they allocate it, they make it up on paper and then try (and fail) to cover it later.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Ignore money. Think in terms of stuff. Metal that gets put into Humvees can't be put into something else. We threw away an insane amount of stuff. And think in terms of people. People that spend a year as soldiers in Afghanistan can't spend that year doing something else. We threw an insane amount of people-time, and a tragically insane amount of people. There is an opportunity cost in terms of both stuff and people. We can print money, but we can't print stuff or people.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Gravey 5y ago
  > Think in terms of stuff. Metal that gets put into Humvees can't be put into something else. We threw away an insane amount of stuff. Much of that stuff has actually found itself in the hands of those it was made to fight against. This is significantly worse than throwing it away in my opinion.
  - Grakel 5y ago
    But much of the money went to American businesses and jobs. The stuff itself can easily be replaced.
    - Sharlin 5y ago
      You might want to familiarize yourself with the broken window fallacy.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- koolba 5y ago
  > People that spend a year as soldiers in Afghanistan can't spend that year doing something else. The greatest asset the US has built up over the past twenty or so years fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan is a reserve of soldiers with real world military experience. I’m not saying it justifies the cost. Far from it. But it’s not a complete wash from a mid term strategic analysis.
  - Grakel 5y ago
    Sadly it would be a big problem if we went 20 years without a war, the military would be greatly deteriorated.
  - Johnny555 5y ago
    The greatest asset the US has built up over the past twenty or so years fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan is a reserve of soldiers with real world military experience. The average term of enlistment in the USA military is 15 years, 11 years for officers. So that experience gets lost quickly unless we keep getting embroiled in new wars.
    - hn8788 5y ago
      There's no way the average term of enlistment is 15 years. Very few people choose to re-enlist after their first term, or are even allowed to. In 2016, there were almost 200k Marines, and they were struggling to get 10k people to re-enlist after their first 4 years[1]. https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2015/10/12/first-term-marines-are-slow-to-sign-on-for-another-enlistment/ https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2015...
      - Johnny555 5y ago
        I just used the snippet returned a Google search, which said: The average length of enlistment for U.S. military personnel is just under 15 years for all branches. The average service time for officers is a bit less, averaging about 11 years. The U.S. Air Force has an average enlistment time of 14.7 years. Oct 4, 2017 The referenced URL is: https://classroom.synonym.com/beyonce-curls-8729.html https://classroom.synonym.com/beyonce-curls-8729.html (yes, that "beyonce-curls" URL is the right one) Surprisingly, it does include references, but only one of them still exists, which backs up the 11 year number for officers, but not for general enlisted: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2011/10/05/chapter-6-a-profile-of-the-modern-military/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2011/10/05/chapter... The average officer in 2009 had been in the military nearly 11 years, slightly more than a year longer than the average in 1973. The pattern among enlisted personnel is more complicated. The average length of service for enlisted personnel rose from 5.8 years in 1973 to a peak of 7.5 in 1994 and 1996, but then began drifting downward and now stands at 6.7 years.
- babesh 5y ago
  Blood, toil, tears, and sweat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood,_toil,_tears_and_sweat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood,_toil,_tears_and_sweat
- Grakel 5y ago
  Absolutely not. Waste fuels the economy. There's no shortage of metal, only the price of metal. As for people, spending a couple of years in the military is much better personal development for many young people than going to college at an age when most people can't appreciate it. These things aside, of course the loss of life is horrific and a terrible waste.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    1 in 5 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are diagnosed with PTSD. And veterans account for 20 percent of U.S. suicides. https://facethefactsusa.org/facts/the-true-price-of-war-in-human-terms/ https://facethefactsusa.org/facts/the-true-price-of-war-in-h...
  - kortex 5y ago
    On the other hand, college was tough, but didn't kill/maim/disfigure/traumatize me.
  - Sharlin 5y ago
    > Waste fuels the economy. Yeah, and see what mess that sort of thinking has got us into. Economic growth is worthless if it’s not sustainable.
  - yunohn 5y ago
    > 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?
    - Grakel 5y ago
      There's probably more metal in the solar system than the volume of Earth.
      - yunohn 5y ago
        I guess this kind of retort would help you in a pub quiz.
onelastjob 5y ago
You can only print so much money though before the dollar becomes worthless, so there is an opportunity cost since you can't print infinite dollars
- dlp211 5y ago
  Except we don't just print money and give it away. The money is borrowed (backed by some asset), and this distinction matters. IOW, the money that gets printed is (generally) non-inflationary. Stop using what you learned in your Econ 1XX level courses to try and reason about government spending and money operations, especially, US government spending and money operations. What you learned is not applicable.
  - onelastjob 5y ago
    Seems like inflation is skyrocketing to me. Specifically asset inflation. Housing prices, stocks, bitcoin, etc. Basically dollar becoming worth less against these assets thanks to QE.
    - valzam 5y ago
      House prices are a real issue, although I don't think that's only because of increased money supply. Otherwise, does it matter? What's the impact on ordinary people if bitcoin is worth 100 or 1 mio dollars? Notwithstanding the fact that the number of people actively buying financial assets has gone up a lot in recent years, which is bound to increase prices.
    - sneak 5y ago
      Dollars being worth less is obviously true. The well-defined link to this being a result of QE is less clear. I keep hearing that it's supply shortages due to covid and wage increases due to unemployment aid. Who knows if that is true, either.
    - dlp211 5y ago
      There is no such thing as asset inflation. If the price of assets is going up, then they are going up. It sucks that housing is considered an asset (it shouldn't, it should be a consumable) but that is the long and short of it. And you can't have an average 2% inflation target and underperform that target for a decade+, then complain when there is inflation above 2%(which is transitory and caused by simultaneous demand and supply shocks due to covid).
Retric 5y ago
The simplest way to look at it is the national debt would be 22.6T instead of 28.6T. That’s one option where nothing changes except war or no wars. Many people say national debt has zero impacts but eventually nobody is going to be lending the US money if we don’t pay our debt, which one way or another leads to a world of hurt. However, to get that debt we needed to borrowing money from someone and agree to pay them interest. We could have also browned the same money and lowered taxes, or borrowed the same money and had free universal healthcare or whatever other government spending we wanted. That’s what opportunity cost means.
- Grakel 5y ago
  We're never going to pay it, and no we couldn't have gotten universal healthcare. If they had the votes, they would have done both, regardless of cost. They don't have the votes for universal healthcare.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Running out of people willing to lend us money is the ultimate risk. The more we borrow the sooner that happens.
    - mulmen 5y ago
      You mean the more we don’t pay back? Carrying debt generally increases credit rating.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - Retric 5y ago
        Only up to a point, try borrowing say 50 million dollars while making 50k. Before lending money people look at your existing debt load to determine if your likely to pay it back. The same thing happens to countries, though more smoothly as they first require higher interest rates.
yunohn 5y ago
> there's no evidence that Congress would have spent that money on something else “Reality is unchangeable, so we can’t know the unknown” So what? It definitely could’ve been spent better than decade’s killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.
- Grakel 5y ago
  You don't get it. It couldn't have been spent on something else. If the day before 9/11 Congress had passed universal healthcare, free college, and basic income, they still would have spent this money on a war. Are you saying they could have said, oh we got attacked, let's estimate the cost of a war and put it into healthcare?
  - yunohn 5y ago
    No, I’m saying the USA didn’t need to make it a multi-decade war, killing civilians while they were at it.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

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.

techrat 5y ago
Ah yes, but Haliburton couldn't spend money on a 'war against mask wearing', so they were the true victims here. /s, of course. It's been obvious early on that the whole motive for our ratfucking of the middle east had nothing to do with the "WMDs" nor 9/11... lest we would have not gone under false pretenses, actually had gone after the country who financed the ones who flew the planes, nor remained as long as we had after Bin Laden was found. Instead we spent more money than had ever been spent before on one thing in our country's history... but on another country. That money went somewhere. Defense contractors. Meanwhile, infrastructure all across the US is derelict. Case in point, 47,000+ bridges in the US are now considered 'structurally deficient.' https://www.npr.org/2019/04/05/710364158/report-finds-more-than-47-000-structurally-deficient-bridges-in-the-u-s https://www.npr.org/2019/04/05/710364158/report-finds-more-t... Bin Laden himself said what his end goal was. > "We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy," bin Laden said in a taped statement. Only the smallest sign of al-Qaida would "make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations." The article this quote was pulled from is from 2011. So, for at LEAST TEN YEARS, we knew the explicit goal was to prolong an unwinnable war in order to bleed the country dry. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/the-cost-of-bin-laden-3-trillion-over-15-years/238517/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/the-cos... Why couldn't these defense contractors be paid to bring things up to snuff here instead of pissing it away on a 'war against terror' that we had no hope to win? Bin Laden got what he wanted in the end.
runawaybottle 5y ago
Some related numbers for just Afghanistan: American service members killed in Afghanistan through April: 2,448. U.S. contractors: 3,846. Afghan national military and police: 66,000. Other allied service members, including from other NATO member states: 1,144. Afghan civilians: 47,245. Taliban and other opposition fighters: 51,191. Aid workers: 444. Journalists: 72. https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-business-afghanistan-43d8f53b35e80ec18c130cd683e1a38f https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-business-afghanistan-... ——— It’s funny, over 60k Afghan police/military died, and our plan was to arm 300k of them and hope they like perpetual war against the Taliban. Yeah, I think they did a hard pass on that one and just wanted it all to stop.

jaggederest 5y ago

Approximately $20,000 per person. $1000 a year would have made a nice universal basic income for the last 20 years.

marricks 5y ago
Sure, but you can't discount all the US jobs created for defense industry and mercenary corps /s
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  UBI would have generated those same jobs with new consumption! :) Just you know, jobs in service of productive things, and the Halliburtons might actually have to, gasp, compete.
- js2 5y ago
  I know you're being sarcastic, but it's pretty widely agreed for a very long time that defense spending is an inefficient way to create jobs. Here's an article from 1983: https://www.nytimes.com/1983/10/16/jobs/defense-spending-its-effect-on-jobs.html https://www.nytimes.com/1983/10/16/jobs/defense-spending-its... > According to the study, for every $1 billion spent by the Pentagon to buy goods and services, 28,000 jobs are created in the private sector. The same investment would create 32,000 jobs if spent on public transportation, 57,000 if used for personal consumption and 71,000 jobs if spent on education, the report contended.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lucb1e 5y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that wages are quite inflated in the USA and $1000/year is not a livable income (i.e. sufficient for cheap housing, cheap food, water, electricity, basic appliances like a fridge and washing machine, heating, and pretty much nothing else) even in Europe where I'm from. Or am I missing the point of a UBI?
- 5y ago

toomuchtodo 5y ago

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.

oh_sigh 5y ago
Not with the current system. $6.4T over 20 years = $340B/yr. The US spends 2x that per year just for medicare, which only covers approximately 20% of the population.
- mrleinad 5y ago
  Not everyone has to use it, private and public systems can coexist, as it works in many countries.
  - Vecr 5y ago
    That's not M4A then, that's public option. M4A bans all other insurance (apparently? I don't know if there are multiple "versions") for collective bargaining reasons.
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    Sure, but would you consider 30% coverage from the government to be "universal healthcare"? Because that's what you get for $900B/yr. And we already have a public/private mix of healthcare with medicare/medicaid/ACA/workplace offered healthcare. That system, today, covers 90% of the population.
    - mrleinad 5y ago
      I'm not so clear on how that works in the states. Here in Argentina you have a public system that everyone can use. Now, if you want, you can pay for private healthcare and use that if you think it's better, but the public system is still available even then, and there are no limits to what it covers. The public system doesn't care if you can pay it or not, or even if you're a national or a foreigner. Just walk in, show some ID, and you can use it.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jonthepirate 5y ago

Sure glad my taxes are 55%

dlp211 5y ago
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.
- CptJamesCook 5y ago
  37% federal, 13.3% california = 50.3 Most wealthy people spend another 1-2% of their income on property taxes and a bit on sales taxes, etc. I estimate I pay 53% of my income to taxes. I agree that 55% is unlikely tho
  - vaidhy 5y ago
    The federal rate is progressive and not on the entire income. 37% applies only on the taxable income above $518K. Why is this misrepresentation?
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      I spent an hour arguing about taxes with someone until I realized that they didn't understand how marginal taxes worked. I bet you dollars to donuts that if you start talking about taxes in a room full of upper-middle class people, one will tell you about people choosing not to earn more money so they don't get "bumped" into a higher tax rate.
  - tuxoko 5y ago
    You don't pay 37% federal. 37% is only for the top bracket.
  - flowerbeater 5y ago
    The 37% and 13.3% are on marginal income, as I'm sure you know. The effective tax rate is much lower. California and some other states also have required disability insurance that is taken out with the state income tax. It's 1% in CA. And I would count Social Security and Medicare too, equally 7.65%. But the SS part has a cap so the percentage goes down the more you make. All put together, someone making $250K pays about 37% on that to various income taxes listed above. If you were making 1M income a year, that rises to 47%. For 100K, it's about 30%.

throwthere 5y ago

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.

OJFord 5y ago
If you buy a house with a mortgage, I think it's reasonable to say you 'spent' the booked value.
- slacktide 5y ago
  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.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Of course you do, you're just typically rolling it into another mortgage on the next place. Anyway I didn't say and didn't mean it's the only valid interpretation of 'spent', just that it is one.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      No, you don't. You might in a state of nature, but the US has laws against prepayment penalties for mortgages. (Well, against the mortgage originator charging prepayment penalties.) You don't owe interest until it accrues.
      - OJFord 5y ago
        Right, you 'owe the full amount of accrued interest'... Which is not as much as the amount that would've accrued if held to term. I think this is rather beside the point anyway!

lmilcin 5y ago

Nah... probably large portion of this was paid to US corporations and citizens. Spending on the level of government is counterintuitive. If you are government you hand out money but it gets back to you. Unfortunately, interest on that debt is real and is owed to other countries.

mulmen 5y ago
How is it owed to other countries?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lmilcin 5y ago
  You borrow money, they want it back with interest. Have you ever borrowed money from mommy for lollipops? She probably didn't want it back, but other countries are not so nice.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    I interpreted your comment as claiming all government debt is foreign, which seems surprising. Is domestic debt not a thing?
- slacktide 5y ago
  Because they are the ones who lent the US the money. China is the #2 holder of US treasury bonds and currently own about 1T worth. (4% of the US national debt) Japan is the #1 holder at 1.2T. Source: https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt
  - SubiculumCode 5y ago
    No one "lent" us money. It's a fiat currency with a self-imposed limit on new money creation.

markus_zhang 5y ago

Well good job for the boys and girls who managed to grab bucks and power through all those mess then.

baybal2 5y ago

Clinton Bill made the impossible, and balanced US budget, and Bush George very much intentionally, and purposefully undid it

epicureanideal 5y ago

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).

new_realist 5y ago
U.S. spends $4T a year on health care (of which $171.8B is spent on research), vs. $320B a year here.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  4T? No, more like 1T Here is 2019: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56324 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56324 Medicare + Medicaid = 1T.
  - tick_tock_tick 5y ago
    This is federal only. Still don't think it will get up to 4 trillion but linking to federal only is a bit misleading.
  - epicureanideal 5y ago
    But these are actual services provided rather than pure R&D.
bamboozled 5y ago
Climate change will destabilize the world more than any "terrorists" could. Also would've been nice to have seen 6.4 trillion go into renewables tech and investments ~ 20 years ago.
- epistasis 5y ago
  $6.4T into renewables and storage over the past 20 years would have decarbonized the US grid several time over, accelerated the tech curve drastically, nearly completely transitioned us to EVs, and we'd probably have decarbonized a good chunk of industry that is hard to decarbonize now. We'd have cheaper energy than we do today, and cheaper energy forever. We could have been looking at current levels of climate change, instead of the far far bigger changes that we are now going to experience. And why did we spend so much on these countries? It all comes back to oil and the fear of losing access to oil to power the economy. We really should never forgive those who work for the fossil fuel industry for putting us on this timeline with their active deceipt, lies, and massive propaganda campaign. There should be no forgiveness for what they have cost us.

trentnix 5y ago

And a sizable portion of the population believes the government should take on more responsibility, as if those outcomes will be better somehow. It’s Gell-Mann amnesia of another kind.

legitster 5y ago

Without their bizarre accounting, the actual number is closer to $2T spent. 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.

cochne 5y ago
Why do you say the number is closer to $2T? I found this nice graphic, could you point out what is wrong or bizarre about it? https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2019/budgetary-costs-post-911-wars-through-fy2020-64-trillion https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2019/budgetary-c...

xyst 5y ago

Given the current state of Afghanistan, the return on investment is definitely not worth it. Our grandchildren will be paying for this debt. 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.

SubiculumCode 5y ago
A debt denominated in a fiat currency AND we might have spent 2T on the wards, but the full accounting has to include the full cost benefits of those expenditures, some of which could have been positive (in terms of financials).
_RPL5_ 5y ago
"This doesn’t even include the costs... " that the locals paid. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/ https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/ I am sure Brown exaggerates the number of people killed and displaced, but even a conservative estimate is probably a pretty large number.
- hack-news 5y ago
  Americans literally don't care about how many people they've killed, only if it was too expensive to do so. HN used to just flag these discussions, now given the situation this one will stand for a while and the sentiment will momentarily be more reasonable, but just wait for the next terrorist attack for all these American morons to lose their minds and commit further atrocities.

el_jay 5y ago

To those here riffing on the theme of “this misrepresents the volume and beneficiaries of the transactions involved” - you’re not wrong. Accurate representation of public info like this is a top organisational problem for our species at the moment. 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.

Smoosh 5y ago
I think of this when people say we can't afford to mitigate climate change.
- api 5y ago
  If climate change were being caused by communists or Islamists to attack America we would have converted to post-carbon by now. Human adversity pushes buttons in our brain stem that natural processes or random threats do not.
- robomartin 5y ago
  It isn't that we can't afford to mitigate climate change. We cannot mitigate climate change, period. In other words, you could throw all the money on the planet at it and it would not make a dent. No purported solution passes the math and physics tests. It's easy to make a mess. This can be done with very little energy, resources and time. On the other hand, cleaning-up the mess takes far more energy, time and resourced than what went into creating it in the first place. That's the problem. We don't have it. Energy, resources or time. You are far more likely to kill everything on this planet than to fix climate change.

newman314 5y ago

Two words. Universal healthcare. The money is there but the will is not.

gjs278 5y ago
two words. basic math. look up how much universal healthcare actually costs. 6.4t will not cover it for 20 years.

pfdietz 5y ago

If a human life has a statistical value of $9M (the value used in determining if a federal safety regulation is justified), this is 700K lives.

jeffbee 5y ago

The little fact I keep in my mind on this topic is for a fraction of this cost the USA could have simply purchased all of non-urbanized Canada, and this would surely have been a far better investment.

hestefisk 5y ago

“Medicare for all”, the single payer universal healthcare system in the US, was projected to cost between $16-34T [1] over a decade. I know there are some big questions around the actual cost of US aggression / state terrorism since 9/11 (ie 6.4T vs 2T as per other entries in this thread). A rough 80/20 analysis suggests: * We could have funded free healthcare to roughly one quarter of the US population for 10 years (see [1]) * We could have funded free medication for all US citizens for 20 years (assuming US spends an average $1100/yr per patient, approx double of other countries [2], viz a biz the estimated spend of $1K USD / yr per US citizen spent over 20 years on aggression since 9-11 mentioned above) * … I quite like the following quote by Noam Chomsky on US international terror in Afghanistan (and Nicaragua, Iraq, Sudan and many other places): “ The U.S. is officially committed to what is called “low–intensity warfare.” That’s the official doctrine. If you read the definition of low–intensity conflict in army manuals and compare it with official definitions of “terrorism” in army manuals, or the U.S. Code, you find they’re almost the same. Terrorism is the use of coercive means aimed at civilian populations in an effort to achieve political, religious, or other aims. That’s what the World Trade Center bombing was, a particularly horrifying terrorist crime. And that’s official doctrine. I mentioned a couple of examples. We could go on and on. It’s simply part of state action, not just the U.S. of course.” [3] It sums up the meaninglessness quite well. [1] https://www.crfb.org/blogs/how-much-will-medicare-all-cost https://www.crfb.org/blogs/how-much-will-medicare-all-cost [2] https://data.oecd.org/healthres/pharmaceutical-spending.htm#indicator-chart https://data.oecd.org/healthres/pharmaceutical-spending.htm#... [3] https://monthlyreview.org/2001/11/01/the-united-states-is-a-leading-terrorist-state/ https://monthlyreview.org/2001/11/01/the-united-states-is-a-...

nightski 5y ago
It's never been a matter of money. We've seen the government can pass multi trillion dollar bills on demand and increase the budget at will. That's what is lacking, the political power/will to pass such legislation. It's unfortunate but it has nothing to do with this war or its cost.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > It's never been a matter of money. We've seen the government can pass multi trillion dollar bills on demand and increase the budget at will. Not without consequences. Contrary to the headlines, we can’t simply print as much money into existence as we want. For example, the actual cost of the war was closer to $2T. The $6.4T number quoted in this headline is the theoretical sum total including interest payments on the debt well into the future. Simply passing bills to spend money that we don’t have may get things done, but our children have to pay for it eventually. Even cheap debt must still be serviced. A significant portion of your tax bill every year goes to servicing interest on national debt. So no, it’s not simply a matter of political will to spend all the money we want. There are limits.

steve76 5y ago

Now liberals care about money, when it suits their brutal ambition, and use the defeat they sabotaged as an argument for money and power. If liberals want money, wake up for real and kill everyone and steal their land. They're doing it to you. Do it back to them. It's the choice of least violence. Leave them alone, they kill you, then turn inward and kill each other. When humans misbehave and betray their own nature, everything becomes a weapon. Every trade, every product, every paycheck. There's demand not to be horribly murdered, the greatest demand of them all. There is zero demand for mythical medical treatments we don't have or problems a century away whose modern solutions are all painfully corrupt. If there was demand, they would exist. Those good things only come about because people tearing each other apart see the good in them and stop fighting for a moment to seek them. If your plans involve making tolerable the act of being horribly murdered, I suggest you rethink them please. Here's a stimulus check. Stand by to be thrown into a volcano. Liberals love the Taliban. They see themselves in them. They look a lot alike when they want power. No rules to restrain them. Leadership hating their followers. Selfishness. Fooling themselves they know everything. Cowardliness to dare not offend the next rung up on the ladder. Celebrity and identity as the only qualification to lead. If you were out to destroy America, with it's requirements of self-evidence and inalienable rights, what would you do different? I can't tell anymore.

SevenSigs 5y ago

$6.4T AKA $6,400,000,000,000 ... I wonder how much was the cost for killing 1 person https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKrFFFpYgkU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKrFFFpYgkU dang... flagged already

foolinaround 5y ago

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 keep the dollars flowing...

symlinkk 5y ago
I’ve never heard of “posh houses in the beltway” that are owned by people involved in defense, yet you and another poster both brought this up. Is this actually a thing?
- colordrops 5y ago
  Yes, my cousin lives in one. He used to be a soldier that went on several tours in the region, then transitioned to a private job in the industry that made him wealthy.
- ip26 5y ago
  DC property is very expensive. Average home price is over a million. SF is probably worse, but that isn’t really the point.
- imgabe 5y ago
  Northern Virginia, and the areas of MD to the northwest of DC are very, very affluent.
curation 5y ago
We are in it; a cold war with China/Russia.
sreeramb93 5y ago
Yes this is it. American taxpayer money went to americans mostly and some of its allies. 6.4T just did not go to poor communities of color.

new_realist 5y ago

Total U.S. assets amount to about $225 trillion. Spending 1/700th of that per year for the past 20 years to protect those assets seems a reasonable investment.

wonwars 5y ago
While in principle you're right, I hope you realise that the Iraq work was fake and Obama chose to not pull out of Afghanistan even when laden was dead

sonicggg 5y ago

The USA wasted 1 trillion just in that dumpster called Afghanistan, only to see its biggest rival, China, be the only one to secure mining rights with the Taliban. They really learned nothing from recent history. This was a major defeat in the geopolitical chess game.

rdevsrex 5y ago

A staggering sum, but not surprising. I wonder how the last 20 years would have played out if we reacted to 9/11 with humility and soul searching instead of jingoism. I mean, the blowback in the Middle East didn’t come out of nowhere. Hopefully we will learn from this and back to walking softly.

_trampeltier 5y ago

As we did learn last year with Irene Triplett, the last person who got money from the us civil war, a war is not over, when no gun does shot. For many, many years pension has to be paid. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/10/irene-triplett-last-civil-war-pensioner-73-monthly-dies/5333830002/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/10/irene-t...

webwielder2 5y ago

How much would it cost to make the US carbon neutral? Or cure one of the top 10 terminal illnesses/conditions?

wonwars 5y ago

What (and when) were the last three wars where America "won" , meaning fulfill honest objectives in spirit. E.g. Iraq-2003 doesn't count because (1) , objecties weren't honest, you cannot destroy wmd's that didn't exist and (2) the spirit was acclaimed to be elimination of terrorism and it's well known that not only has the situation deteriorated, America funded al Qaeda in that region.

poof131 5y ago

Having spent a decade involved with the military, both big (as a Navy fighter pilot) and small (a tour in Baghdad assisting special forces), I’m disgusted by the waste, destructiveness, and ineffectiveness of these wars. Some of the events that stick in my memory: In 2007, Marine prowler pilots ran it up the chain of command that they were having “zero” effects stopping IEDs in Iraq. They were told to shut up and keep flying the missions even though ground forces would turn off their “effective” vehicle jammers thinking the planes provided support. My friend, flying an F-18, found insurgents shooting rockets at a base, and instead of using a laser or gps guided bomb to take out the threat, he was told to spot for artillery, which preceded to miss the target on multiple shots until the enemy drove away. One of the more effective planes that JSOC leveraged was the super tucano, that could fly at $600 per flight hour versus $10k for an F-18, and also do a better job. Big Navy and Air Force joined together to shut down the program trying to expand its usage. The massive number of contractors in Baghdad, driving around brand new F-350s. Getting paid ungodly sums of money next to their poorly paid military counterparts. Ex-pilots getting paid $20k+ a month for a job I’d happily have done instead of my near meaningless ground-tour job. The SF guys complaining about their “support” contractors getting paid $1k a day and taking none of the risks. Patraeus having a peace deal with Sadr that said US troops wouldn’t enter Sadr City, but of course, all the attacks started being launched from there. So he wanted SF to go in with their Iraq counterparts, not on official orders, but just from a phone call, and not to file a secret after-action report, all so he could claim plausible deniability. An awesome SF captain said “fuck that” and his leadership agreed, telling the general he could provide the order over a phone call but they wouldn’t stop filing after-action reports. I remember Tailhook and all the admirals, McCain, and CEOs of leading contractors all schmoozing it up. Proceeding to build planes and weapons the operators didn’t want: one plane to do everything (JSF), a crapy Navy ATFLIR (when the Sniper was better). Topgun instructors were ordered not to talk about deploying Sniper pods on F-18s. I’m sure some of the admirals are probably on the board of directors now. The level of grift in senior leadership is just amazing. What an embarrassing moment for the talking heads and leaders of our national security apparatus. Afghanistan should never have been more than SF and airpower. And the Iraq war never should have been. We can’t build nations with the military. But once a war starts, everyone wants to play because it’s the money spigot. Not too different from large civilian orgs. But really this is all our fault. I remember sitting in a palace on a hill in Baghdad, in an SF operations center, watching a wall-full of flatscreen displays, with predator feeds of young SF soldiers risking their lives, next to talking heads screaming about the developing financial crisis. Seeing the massive outcry and response to the stock market crashing, I realized the wars were just a tv show and didn’t really matter. No one cared, especially compared to their pocketbook. And once I got out in 2011, I didn’t pay much attention myself either. But I do vote now for politicians who talk about reducing the US military presence abroad and view with disgust fake hawks who’ve never served but are happy to send others to war for American prestige. And good on Biden for finally pulling the plug even if the execution bordered on incompetence. There probably really wasn’t another option. Listen to the generals who’d say “stay, we can’t give up”…. the endless graft. A sad time for many of the Afghan people. /rant.

rcurry 5y ago

Whatever. We have all these online sites where we can do battle over politics. Can’t we keep HN as a fun place to talk about tech stuff?

minikites 5y ago
Everything is political, technology is incredibly political.

tick_tock_tick 5y ago

That seems unbelievable cheap for 20 years of war?

asdff 5y ago
Keep in mind our opponents were farmers and herders who took up found weaponry. I wonder what their end of the bill looks like. Probably not 6.4 trillion.

minikites 5y ago

Imagine if we spent that money on a new version of the Marshall Plan and created new markets for our economy. Instead we bomb and shoot people for no reason and create a generation of people who hate us.

jeffrogers 5y ago

Whatever the number, the privacy costs and the downstream implications are significantly higher. Who knows where that will all end...

gerash 5y ago

The money spent on the military does trickle down to create a set of jobs and funds some research work. That said, it doesn't seem like the best capital allocation. Spending so much human capital, time and effort on trying to put together metal objects which either shoot bullets or blow up isn't the most useful endeavor esp. when there is not much competition to necessitate the efforts.

duxup 5y ago

I remember when Bush Jr's big campaign promise was "no nation building". And then we got ultra nation building. Maybe he should have listened to himself?

curation 5y ago

The West is an itinerant war machine. We define who we are, prove our ethics via an Other we best. The only solution is Copernican.

Coneylake 5y ago

Doesn't most of this money go back to paying American soldiers and so most of this money goes back into the American economy?

gdsdfe 5y ago

I wonder how much of that went to the pocket of members of the Bush administration. They had big interests in various DOD suppliers.

andyxor 5y ago

how much would it cost to terraform Mars

fractal618 5y ago

My therapist says I shouldn't read stuff like this anymore because it upsets me too much.

busymom0 5y ago

There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. - smedley butler War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. - smedley butler War is just a racket... I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. - smedley butler Major General Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 – June 21, 1940), nicknamed "Old Gimlet Eye",[1] was a senior United States Marine Corps officer who fought in both the Mexican Revolution and World War I. During his 34-year career as a Marine, he participated in military actions in the Philippines, China, and Central America; the Caribbean during the Banana Wars; and France in World War I. Butler was, at the time of his death, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. By the end of his career, Butler had received 16 medals, five for heroism. He is one of 19 men to receive the Medal of Honor twice, one of three to be awarded both the Marine Corps Brevet Medal (along with Wendell Neville and David Porter) and the Medal of Honor, and the only Marine to be awarded the Brevet Medal and two Medals of Honor, all for separate actions. In 1933, he became involved in a controversy known as the Business Plot, when he told a congressional committee that a group of wealthy industrialists were planning a military coup to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with Butler selected to lead a march of veterans to become dictator, similar to fascist regimes at that time. The individuals involved all denied the existence of a plot, and the media ridiculed the allegations, but a final report by a special House of Representatives Committee confirmed some of Butler's testimony. Butler later became an outspoken critic of American wars and their consequences. In 1935, Butler wrote a book titled War Is a Racket, where he describes and criticizes the workings of the United States in its foreign actions and wars, such as those in which he had been involved, including the American corporations and other imperialist motivations behind them. I would highly recommend the audiobook of his book from 1920s: Warning from 1920s: WAR IS A RACKET by Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler - FULL AudioBook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26O-2SVcrw0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26O-2SVcrw0

soheil 5y ago

It’s so odd that people treat this as if that money has evaporated. It was spent by the US in the US. I don’t know any billionaire defense contractors but I could be wrong. That means the money was spent on workers and equipment. The former creates jobs the later pushes our envelope of technological know-how forward, think DARPA => internet. Lastly the dollar is the world reserve currency. We’re not really paying for every dollar we spend, there is a lot of leverage we have in deciding what countries get to pay what portion of each dollar we borrow. To fight this, is the main reason euro was created and why the European Union came to be. Last I checked Eurozone is not doing so well economically.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

What about the social costs? Vietnam was the start of American mistrust of government. Now soldiers and their families are learning that all the suffering was meaningless. I’m surprised people still sign up for the military.

SevenSigs 5y ago

The cost of Afghan war: $6.4T... the number killed: 51000... cost per death? $125.5M

Borrible 5y ago

Who in his right mind, would mind the costs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion

Abu975mr22 5y ago

Gds