Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to "The three trillion dollar war."

The last paradigm shift: "The victory won't be worth the money."
TB — (archived)

First it was the casualties. Then it was the political progress. Is this what's left?

I could have a lot of fun applying the same rules they are using to any other war or government project: adding in every last peripheral consequence, real, projected, or supposed.

How would, for example, the "War on Poverty" survive that kind of calculation? Poverty rate forty years ago: 12.8 percent. Poverty rate in 2006: 12.3 percent. The number has never been lower than 11 percent in all that time. The direct cost of that came to over $5 trillion, and I don't think that includes inflation adjustment. If we add in peripherals like the conversion of almost an entire demographic to a dependent crime-ridden, broken-familied underclass, what would that come to?

The $5 trillion cost of WWII described (I calculate it out as more like $4 trillion in 2007 dollars) obviously doesn't include every peripheral effect of the war on the U.S. over the following decades either. How would that work out? Can I include the cost of giving Eastern Europe to the Soviets? A loss of American productive lives that dwarfs that of the Iraq War?

I could screw with the numbers in other ways, like putting all the costs of various wars into percentages of U.S. GDP at the time. Guess how that works out?

I could even calculate positive benefits from previous wars, hot or cold. An example: What was the net fiscal effect to the world of not letting South Korea turn into an extension of North Korea? Do I subtract the benefit of a capitalist Japan from the WWII costs? The economic benefits to the U.S.?

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