Through Fiscal Year 2020, the United States federal government has spent or obligated $6.4 trillion dollars on the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. This figure includes: direct Congressional war appropriations; war-related increases to the Pentagon base budget; veterans care and disability; increases in the homeland security budget; interest payments on direct war borrowing; foreign assistance spending; and estimated future obligations for veterans’ care. The current wars have been paid for almost entirely by borrowing. This borrowing has raised the US budget deficit, increased the national debt, and had other macroeconomic effects, such as raising consumer interest rates. Unless the US immediately repays the money borrowed for war, there will also be future interest payments. We estimate that interest payments could total over $6.5 trillion by the 2050s. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/economic https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2019/US Budgetary Costs of Wars November 2019.pdf In U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower Cross of Iron speech, he explains the exchange rate for war: 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.
And this is what we get: https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news/afghanistan-taliban-us-news-08-16-21/index.html Taliban taking over the capital in less than TEN days, with American-made weapons!!
Dump truck, they've had M16s and M4s for years. Here's a mullah with POTUS Biden's personal SCAR-H! He's dead now... he got into a gunfight before realizing he didn't have a stash of 7.62x51.
And how much ( I mean how little) did the Taliban spent over the past 20 years? They don't have the very expensive aircraft carrier, spy satellite, killer drone, fighter plane, armored tank, big gun.... They don't even have basic things like uniforms, combat boots, helmets for the fighters. And they won the war. I am sure there will be books after books talking about their 'success story'.
Good luck with that one... Fk em! works well behind your screen at home but doesn't translate so well in international government finance.
Yeah, it does. Remember when that poor kid came home from North Korea, who was tortured for stealing a poster of Kim Jung Un, and died shortly after coming home? Remember how our court system found North Korea guilty and ordered them to pay 10 million to the family? Remember how you heard NK paid the penalty? No, you didn't. Because it didn't happen. International finance my ass. China has such a huge surplus against us, they can fucking bite it. They make so much money off of our consumers, they can chalk up their US debt purchases as a bad bet, and write it off. What...You are a fan of China? You want to give them free money?