Oh, buddy, I'm 1000% with you here. Hell I was just trying to explain to someone why the Afghanistan war was, in fact, not a source of great wealth and economic

Oh, buddy, I'm 1000% with you here. Hell I was just trying to explain to someone why the Afghanistan war was, in fact, not a source of great wealth and economic prosperity for the US and I used an extremely similar argument (If we sent over fewer tanks would we have had more steel for cars, and a cheaper used car market now?). My cynicism is more along the lines of A. Lots of people think GDP == real wealth and can't seem to wrap their heads around our argument B. You don't have to do better than you have been to keep the global-economic pole position, you just have to be doing better than everyone else. I'm not gonna elaborate on the rest of this, I'll leave that as a sad exercise to the reader. I really really hope we don't start or find ourselves required to participate in a war.