[elcritch]

I generally agree, but I don't think Afghanistan and Iraq were rounding errors by any factor. It's a major percentage of the US'es debt, as in trillions of dollars.

Perhaps the US economy (and politics) is resilient enough to handle it and not crash outright, but poorer folks in the US feel the squeeze of inflation and lowered wages due to cantillion effects.

[WeylandYutani]

America is in the enviable position that the entire world is obligated to keep giving them money. Too big to fail.

[nebula8804]

Thats just because others need to step up their game.

[adolph]

A truer measure of the [Astan & Iraq] wars’ total costs pegs them at between $4 trillion and $6 trillion.[0] (2015 article)

US debt in 2000: $5.6T, in 2022: $30.9T [1]

The larger wars of this century drove about a quarter of debt growth. Major but not the majority. That more people will risk life and limb to immigrate than emigrate indicates to me that as bad as inflation is, living elsewhere is still worse.

0. https://time.com/3651697/afghanistan-war-cost/

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/187867/public-debt-of-th...

[elcritch]

A quarter sounds about right, and that's a quarter of our debt that could've been used to rebuild decaying infrastructure, increase medical care, housing, etc. Aside from the monetary cost the country will loose out on the dividends those sort of investments would've yielded long term.

Sure the US may still have a higher quality of life than many others, it doesn't mean that Americans lives couldn't have been better. Also I believe the US recently actually had decreases in both life expectancy and younger generations prospering fincially. So we didn't collapse, but we're not healthy either.

[adolph]

The initial conjecture is that the US' "Adversaries see [wasteful profligacy] as weakness." We have established that the US seems to spend wildly with muted negative outcomes. To an adversary, should that be seen as a weakness or a strength?

Could things be better in the US if it did not spend the way it does? That is a difficult counterfactual. The well adapted US political system never voluntarily decreases taxes, so a safe assumption is that spending/deficit/debt would be the same.

A significant amount of war funding was spent on the MIC, which employs upper middle income US persons in engineering, logistics, HR. The rest is spent on consumables (also from the US) and bribery, which eventually finds safe harbor by holding large bricks of US $100 bills on the low end or US luxury dwellings on the high end.

In the counterfactual, what would have happened to all those white collar suburbs and Miami penthouses?

[asadotzler]

The pentagon's budget is pretty consistent regardless.

We'll give them three quarters of a trillion dollars every year no matter what they spend it on so in reality it doesn't matter if they're war fighting or not, they own us, well 50% of our discretionary tax dollars anyway.