Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to you didnt answer the question: 'was it worth it'?

I don't know yet. Neither do you.
TB — (archived)

It's obvious now that WWII was worth the money and lives spent. So was Korea.

Vietnam, not so much. I've heard from people who are in a place to know that pumping money into the Vietnam War helped break the bank in the Soviet Union, but I'm not putting a lot of weight on that.

What we spent on weapons and troops stationed around the world for fifty years of the Cold War was mostly money, not lives--unless you count Vietnam as part of the Cold War--but was that worth it?

In ten or fifteen years, we'll know if it was worth it.

Ideally such a judgment would take into account what Saddam's regime would have cost if it had been left in place, but you know nobody likes to go there. Hint: Exactly when was Iran supposed to have decided it didn't need nukes any more?

Please tell us, we know you would howl if we proposed spending that much money in any effort to actually help people...

The three trillion number is crap. If you take the actual cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past six years given in the article, about $845 billion, that's far less than what we're spending right now every single year "helping people."

Even if you accept the $3 trillion number, that's the equivalent to something over two years of our social spending. And then there's the next two years. And the next. And the next.

I don't think anyone's being shortchanged here. Particularly when you work out where all that money is actually going.

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