To those here riffing on the theme of “this misrepresents the volume and beneficiaries of the transactions involved” - you’re not wrong. Accurate representation of public info like this is a top organisational problem for our species at the moment.
But I do think you miss the point, so aptly put by Mr Eisenhower:
“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.”
In a strictly limited sense, I’d rather get my cross of iron at 66% off than for the full $6.4T. Better yet would be universal healthcare, enough homes to go round, clean, sustainable energy production systems, and bridges that keep on bridging.
Ever since we reneged on the decision Kennedy made to pull out of VietNam by Johnson, we've thought continually we were dealing with another defeated Japan or defeated Germany --the enemy population would just comply to our wishes, so we kept on thinking we could "turn them into replicas of American government"
This thinking has undermined our actions in every major war since then, with the exception of GWI. Gulf War One, we went in, did the job and got out. I'm not sure we should have gone in in the first place, but at least we didn't try to artificially change the government there.
It's disheartening to see the admins of Bush and Obama arrogantly and foolishly pursuing a transformational goal. It does not work.
A nation has to work out its own problems for itself. They have to experience an organic, sometimes violent, process of progression toward democracy for themselves.
Let's go back to congress needing to authorize wars and give them sole war-powers with the exception of immediate threats.
All of the people involved in these foreign war debacles were highly pedigreed. (Fun fact: the President of Afghanistan, who fled Kabul yesterday, is an Ivy League-educated professor who "literally wrote the book on fixing failed states.")
The education, in fact, the problem. Universities is where people learn hare-brained ideas like Wilsonianism. It's where people learn to view government as a set of laws and policies and boxes on org charts, rather than the manifestation of the culture and political tradition of people.
Coming from a traditional Muslim country ourselves, my family knew in 2001 that nation building in Afghanistan was an absurd idea. Our own country has a thousand-year head start on Afghanistan in terms of civilization, and has still struggled with democracy. It's not in the people. But Americans are so far separated from their culture--that is to say, their village won't die of starvation if they indulge in cultural experimentation--they can't even locate the wellspring of democracy in culture and traditions.
The cultural aspect is critical and people have overlooked in many places. The Optimism for Russia after the fall of the USSR, Ukraine and Afghanistan, Libya, etc. Places with no democratic foundation or tradition but plagued by corruption.
It needs to grow over decades organically for the people to get used to the idea and the institutions, for example, like in Hong-Kong. Singapore is another example and they yet don't have completely open democracy.
The ground must be fertile, as they say in allegorical terms, for democracy to take root. You can't impose it and then wish it to work and have it work. You can't throw money at it (as AF has shown us). It's a messy process. Sometimes, like Panama, you have the right accidents happen and it works --but at least then they could rely on the legacy of Marti (as they were part of Columbia during independence from Spain) and they had the US administer the Canal Zone till '00, I believe.
In Bangladesh, we have had real elections, leaving aside the the assassinations and that one military dictatorship. But we're back to one-party rule as the leader of the opposition party has been jailed. And that's after having 800+ years of civilization under the Sultanates and 200 years under Britain.
It's not economics--our PPP GDP per capita is about what the U.S. was at in the late 19th century (at which point it had been a successful multi-party democracy for 70-80 years).
You don't have to neglect that no country is invaded to spread democracy. And people learn from that. Not from what you say, they learn from what you do and that is defending your interests. The spite will be larger than the love for freedom and democracy, hell, the US doesn't currently make the impression that they like freedom very much.
That is not a clear cut in Afghanistan. Perhaps the US just invaded because the Russian tried and it was believed that its hub location could enact control on neighboring countries. Terrorism netted the needed excuse, but it continued after Bin Laden was out of the picture.
Many former USSR countries are doing quite well with their new democracies. Consider, for example, that Ukraine had basically as much democratic tradition as Poland had (big parts of it literally being parts of Commonwealth of Poland for centuries), and yet Poland’s democracy has been doing much better.
I agree that culture and traditions matter, but with your examples, you are overstating your case.
I don't know about Poland, but Ukraine is certainly not a democracy. Starting from the fact that the presidents are appointed by oligarchs (you may call it a conspiracy theory, but it's true), the country is plagued by corruption. Ending with the fact that current president and his party are closing media of opposing parties (so much for "freedom of speech").
Nor does it help the Ukraine. All the industry was destroyed in the last 30 years. And agriculture is not enough: if you seed all available land of Ukraine, it would produce only about $40 bln of agricultural products, while Ukraine yearly imports from abroad are $60 bln. The country is unsustainable, it would eventually collapse. It's not the only country in the world that consumes more than it produces, but other countries have some kind of advantages allowing them to subsist while being netto importers. E.g. USA also consumes more than it produces, but it can freely print world reserve currency and buy whatever it needs. If someone objects, it has most expensive army with bases all over the world to suppress any discontent. Ukraine doesn't have a single possible way out.
Eventually people that have any skills and energy will migrate to Europe/Russia/other countries (I was constantly surprised how many there're Ukrainians working in every part of the world - even the most remote ones), existing population will wither. There's a conspiracy theory that Ukrainian government is afraid to organize population census (the last one was long time ago), because they know that results will be unpleasantly surprising.
Ukraine is poor. It is corrupted. Its population is declining.
It has a chance still: there is a social demand for a different lifestyle and organisation of the state, which eventually will solve many problems Ukraine has and will make it a place not worse that any other East-European country. Now it's on the way of building democracy and it may fail without help, unfortunately.
What we need from the West is constant pressure on our establishment to setup effective institutions, especially in the anti-corruption domain.
Source: I'm a Ukrainian still staying in Ukraine because I believe the above is true. Otherwise I'd move to EU with very little effort or to Russia with no effort at all.
I'm not going to discuss all of your wrong assumptions, just mentioning "closing media". Do you know the narrative those media were spreading? Do you know who is Medvedchuk? These media were pro-russia propagandists.
> am I wrong in the assessment of the economical situation and population decline in Ukraine
Yes you are. You showed (without evidence but let's assume) that $40bn of agricultural exports don't cover the $60 of Ukraine imports. Only 15% of people there work in agriculture. The other 85% of workers are just as capable of creating value for export.
> Am I wrong that all the industry in Ukraine was destroyed
Yes, and it is so obvious a lie that it strains credulity. Even just ignoring the well known mining/iron ore/iron/steel/pipe industry that has at least a dozen well known big companies. Plus of course Ukraine manufactures a lot of other things from cars to armament to confectionary.
And if it came to an export/currency collapse people would and could adapt and buy the local food/cars/trucks (even if they don't have the same quality or variety as foreign goods).
Many of my friends who are from Ukraine actually prefer to work in St. Petersburg and Moscow due to better opportunities and higher pay. Granted, compared to the US Russia's economy is horrendous, but the opportunities are still greater than what is available in Ukraine, at least as perceived by 20-something aged Ukrainians.
The petro-dollar is a bit of a catch 22. Either we produce our own domestically and purchase with Canada (ideally using the keystone pipeline - but we know how that played out) or we throw out all of our internal production for "environmental" reasons and continue to pillage the middle east to make sure we have enough oil.
IMO, taking a bit of an environmental hit or trading with Canada is far superior to spending trillions blowing up the middle east and causing more problems than were there to begin with in an already historically unstable region.
Apparently you have some advice for the State Department about how to stabilize a place that has lacked stability for centuries, I bet they could use some advice about now.
If the interest was actually stability then there is plenty of advise. The thing is most of the actions of the US are not out of the interest of stability, it's pure economics and political influence. The US has destabilised or overthrown many stable democratic governments for a more US favourable dictator.
Germany had no democratic tradition either, it was corrupt too. And, as someone else said, many former USSR countries are doing quite well with their new democracies.
The factors are way more complicated then just that.
An authoritarian regime that liberalizes the underlying foundation of the country often creates the stage for a functional democracy. That happened in Germany, South Korea, Singapore, etc. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_of_Freedom
But you can’t go from being a tribal society based on kinship ties and the only rule of law being the decisions of village elders to democracy.
Of course Germany had democratic traditions, going back to the early/middle of the 19th century. The Frankfurter Nationalversammlung at 1848, while it failed quite spectacularly, consisted of people from all over Germany debating. Even before that in many of the smaller kingdoms the people had achieved some representation and constitutions they guaranteed them the basic democratic rights of assembly, speech and a parliament in which to voice their opinions.
The Kaiserreich had a parliament. Weimar failed in the end and had plenty of problems but still it was a democratic government and that despite major challenges (Civil War, lost World War, bad economy).
And if you are willing to look into the many states and small countries that made up Germany before its unification you have 'democratic' city-states going back to the middle ages. Don't forget that Germany was and is deeply federal (Its official name is 'Federal Republic of Germany' after all).
Even right before the democracy was abolished by the Nazis the largest federal state was governed by the Social Democrats (Prussia).
Hell, our social democrats keep telling everybody that their party was founded on 23 May 1863 even if nobody cares.
Weimar was forced on them and was seen as disorderly mess by population. Yes, they had parliament pre-WWI and they still were not democracy. They were monarchy run by royal families. They were also highly militarized country at that too.
Some debates and some representation does not constitute "democratic tradition".
Weimar was forced on Germany? The Kaiser had abdicated, there were revolutions all around Germany, the navy was in full on mutiny. Of course it was seen as disorderly mess but it was in no way forced upon the population from outside and instead was the result of a dozen different forces inside of Germany pulling and pushing to achieve their own personal goals. While it started with bloodshed (Mainly between the communists and the democratic left) in the following elections the social democrats where elected with a wide majority, which in large parts was a testament to the level of public support they and their democracy had.
And I am really curious what would constitute a "democratic tradition" in your opinion. By 1945 the German people had been organizing themselves for around a hundred years in different parties, unions, parliaments. They had newspapers discussing everything from politics, culture, society and democracy. They had organized countless nationwide strikes and participated in two revolutions. The first chancelor of Germany after 1945 had been a democratically elected mayor of Cologne for around 15 years. Was part of a political party since 1907.
Maybe look at the Kapp Putsch. Right wing politicians and militias occupied Berlin in 1920. The democratically elected government called for a general strike and for the next couple of days the whole country stood still. No trains. No work in any factory. No news paper. No telephone. In Berlin there was no water. No electricity. Absolutely nothing. This doesn't happen in a nation with an apathetic populace which has no democratic tradition and just wants it's Kaiser back.
Democratic tradition doesn't just consist of having a parliament as the highest authority in your country if you ask me.
> Some debates and some representation does not constitute "democratic tradition".
Those things are the foundation for what becomes democracy. To use England as the clearest example, Democracy there evolved with feudal aristocrats creating a parliament to have input to the king’s decision making, and from there parliament taking on more and more power and eventually being turned over to popular control through elections.
Germany differs from Afghanistan in having had centuries of experience with bureaucratic society, e.g., implementing the world's first welfare state in the 1870s.
In my country the two best economics are offered by a leftwing/socialist and a rightwing/free-market university, respectively.
What always astounded me was that even though the faculties are nuanced and respect both sides, the students are just blindly leftist or rightist when they graduate. For instance, teachers at the pro-markets university know that markets have failures so blindly free markets is usually not the answer. But students? Hell no.
So universities are indeed effective at imparting not just tools and teaching people how to learn, but at brainwashing maybe 90% of the students into following the beliefs they teach them. How do you break that? No clue. But I see the same thing with people consuming media, etc. so I guess it's just a human trait.
As a former academic myself, I can confirm that universities are unfortunately good at building cult-like followings - not only cult-like followings, thankfully, but still.
Do you think that this has an impact on the situation in Afghanistan?
No, education is not the problem. Universities are supposed to be places where different ideas are meant to be discussed openly without fear of persecution. It is easy to criticise ideas that failed after the fact, but that is not the reason to criticise universities or education. We are talking here using a system based of decades of trying different ideas none of which were developed with a guy with grenade launcher or a religious man in a religious school. Education is not a problem. People who don't value it and don't learn from the past are.
I wrote that they are "are supposed to be" not that they "are" such places. Their current state does not negate the idea. The alternative is no education and no freedom. It is not a good alternative.
One could argue that the seeds of destruction are so far entrenched, that there might only be 1-3 cycles left before the destruction of its own democracy is ensured. The Iranian clerical leadership was rejoicing on twitter about Trumps election claims and January 6th. This has also been cannonfodder for the Chinese leadership and countless other countries.
I'd say the US elites are still somewhat in denial of what actually happened and that it didn't happen in a vacuum, but was years if not decades in the making. Remember that Bill Barr had the unitary executive theory in mind long before Trump came into power, but previous Republican leadership considered it too radical for the American public to accept.
> Remember that Bill Barr had the unitary executive theory in mind long before Trump came into power, but previous Republican leadership considered it too radical for the American public to accept.
You're invoking an anachronism--it wasn't until the 20th century that we even got the idea of "independent" bureaucrats insulated from accountability to the elected President. George Washington's original cabinet consisted of just four members: Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of War Henry Knox, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph. All of those were plainly intended to be subordinate to Washington as the President.
As recently as JFK we had Bobby Kennedy as AG (as competent as he was). Imagine the heart attacks people would have today if Biden tried putting a relative in as AG, or if Trump had tried the same.
US elites mostly only care about the trough. They know it but apres moi le deluge is the silent motto of many. The Democratic is no radical different from he Republicans, they simply have a nicer face.
Nowadays it's already difficult if not impossible. In the age of big data and open manipulation, there is zero incentive for the politicians, corporations and media to promote independent thought for ordinary people, or to put more precisely only independent thoughts that benefit their agendas.
The same goes to millions of middle class employees of those entities. They might want to teach independent thoughts to their own kids but other than that they have zero incentive to promote independent thoughts to their customers because it's profit and power that feeds their family.
I really don't see an easy way out of this downward spiral.
The good news is there are more independent thoughts these days. 70 years ago it was hard having independent thoughts when it was three channels on TV and two newspapers and everyone listened to the same couple of popular artists. Back then, if you were too independent you would get beat up after class or worse.
This is spot on. As aggravating as YouTube censorship is, it's given the power of the press back to the people, if not just for a little bit. This flew under everyone's radar I think and the powers who typically control the news have been scrambling to regain control.
>it's given the power of the press back to the people
You are mistaken. Social media and things like youtube, just like elections, provide the appearance of power and choice, but just safely let people to let out pent up emotions. Then they safely contain it without it being spilled to the real world to a certain extent, at the same time give the people who participate in them a certain feeling of "doing something", a fallacy that even I am committing right now while I write this comment down..
As Noam Chomsky said "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum".
We already know that youtube and other media like reddit even HN "strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion", and as you said, they also allow very lively debate withing the rest of the spectrum..
> Then they safely contain it without it being spilled to the real world to a certain extent
Like January 6th? Safe containment indeed.
> youtube and other media like reddit even HN "strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion"
Which results in an ever increasing number of extremist refugees. The Fediverse appears to be growing consistently and I think the systemic mechanisms that are concentrating extreme viewpoints there should be cause for concern.
On the plus side, if a particularly interesting video is removed from YouTube you can often find it mirrored there.
No. YouTube actively blocks any discontent. You can say anything you want as long as it is something that not threatening "democracy" or "liberal discourse". E.g. probably you can upload a video stating that Earth is flat, but you'll be immediately blocked if you upload something criticizing LGBT* or other sensitive areas. I've seen it many times.
Also, YouTube (and Google in general) manipulates search results. E.g. in Russia you're fed by force with Navalny's channel. If you block his channel explicitly, YouTube starts to show you one of the thousand clones of it. Or other content with similar views. While content that contradicts the YouTube censorship policy will be well hidden from view.
It's not a freedom of speech.
I understand that US has the strongest propaganda and state of the art brainwashing techniques. So the usual reply is something like: "But it's the absolute truth! Anyone trying to refute it is a bigot!" But I know the only truth: there's no absolute universal truth. Imagine what science would be if it would be disallowed to refute theories?..
US bigotry is something resembling a religion: "We know better how people in country X should live!", "We know better how all the world should view same sex marriage!", "We know better how the country Y should be governed!", etc, etc. But the point is that most of the time people saying this don't know where the country is located, it's culture and traditions, why the people live the way they live, do they like it or not, etc. They just sure that everyone would be happy to eat hamburgers, drink Coca Cola and have Disneylands everywhere. It's such an arrogant dumb view, but it's ingrained in every western person by the best media and propagandists.
"They might want to teach independent thoughts to their own kids but other than that they have zero incentive to promote independent thoughts to their customers because it's profit and power that feeds their family."
This point is about the only bright spot in an otherwise grim perspective. Just about everyone, and that appears to include Putin, wants to do well by their kids education-wise. The rest can fuck off and die, but the self-preservation in the sense of preserving genes by teaching the ability to think critically is important enough that at least there is a chance that spiral will hit a bump here and there.
That's right. I don't have existential dread about Putin or Xi. They want total power, wealth and stability. They're corrupt pragmatists, not zealots who are going to die in a nuclear Armageddon. I fear the ideologically committed madman much more.
However, they are also empire builders whose agenda requires weakening the power, wealth and stability of every entity that they consider targets and/or competitor. As someone who lives in one such entity, I consider this threatening.
Not glorious-nuclear-self-destruction dreadful, but still potentially life-threatening.
>We weren't occupying or administering Iraq, but we didn't leave, either.
I mean, we never left Germany or S. Korea, so... Playing big brother to Q8? I'm not mad.
Like other countries, we can pick sides and aid whatever side we think has our interest. I'm not interested in intervening with infantry and all the necessary materiel unless it's to defend ourselves from grave danger. Especially avoid stupid the boondoggle of "nation-building". Not everyone wants democracy right now. It may come later.
>Both of the long wars started under Bush had Congressional authorization.
True, but they gave him blanket authorization for use of military force (open ended) rather than a declaration of war), this open-endedness allowed Obama! to use the same AUMF to engage in further conflict.
> I'm not interested in intervening with infantry and all the necessary materiel unless it's to defend ourselves from grave danger.
Grave danger was cited by the President, and concurred in as justifying war by Congress, in both of the long wars commenced under Bush.
> True, but they gave him blanket authorization for use of military force (open ended) rather than a declaration of war)
The Supreme Court has long recognized exercise of Congress’ war powers without magic words as legitimate declarations of war, and also recognized conditional declarations of war (including, again, those without magic words) as declarations of war. Magic words may be relevant to the application of other domestic law (because Congress may have chosen to make them so), but it does not change the fact that any time Congress, with or without magic words, and unconditionally or conditioned on some other fact (including a Presidential determination) “authorizes” war, it is in fact exercising its Constitutional power to declare war. In fact, it first did so in regard to the Congressional authorization for the Quasi-War of 1798-1800, which was the very first Congressional exercise of its power to declare war.
Have you looked up polls of Afghanistan’s citizens on whether they want a democratic election process, whether they preferred life under the Taliban, etc? They overwhelmingly preferred the state of things under the US’s support and overwhelmingly support democracy. They can’t fight for it because they fear being shot or beheaded by Taliban terrorists. To read their lack of resistance as a rejection of democracy is to deny everyday Afghanis their agency just because they want to survive to see tomorrow.
> If it doesn’t work within 2-5 years, it’s not going to work. Cut your losses and run.
That seems very arbitrary. I would say twenty years is not enough, because a longer time period would mean that older, experienced Taliban fighters and organizers would be too old to continue their activities or just dead. It also isn't enough time if we haven't done a good job managing our efforts there, and we needed better leadership and accountability around our efforts to establish the new government and their military (more at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/how-americ...).
I cannot understand why you think 2-5 years is the magic time to judge an effort like this by. Do you think that's true for everything in life? If a company can't IPO in 2 years they should just cut their losses and run?
> Maybe there was some support for this in some areas of Kabul, but certainly not in the countryside.
What's your evidence for this? Every poll I could find on Google suggests there is broad support for democracy in Afghanistan.
> True, but they gave him blanket authorization for use of military force (open ended) rather than a declaration of war), this open-endedness allowed Obama! to use the same AUMF to engage in further conflict.
If anything, your points here only go to demonstrate how irrelevant the nominal power of congressional authorization is, in the current political climate (and for most of the history of the republic.)
What makes it mostly irrelevant is that almost any representative voting for caution will be tarred with the "soft on America's enemies" brush, marginalized, and quickly removed from office. That's democracy in action, and it has been that way, for the most part, since the founding of the nation.
What kept the USA in Afghanistan, and the USSR before, was a form of sunk cost fallacy (in blood more than dollars), in which nation-building became more of a prayer for a non-catastrophic exit than an arrogant goal of a self-appointed elite.
> I'm not interested in intervening with infantry and all the necessary materiel unless it's to defend ourselves from grave danger. Especially avoid stupid the boondoggle of "nation-building". Not everyone wants democracy right now. It may come later.
This short sightedness might cost more in lives globally and money loss from trade and resources being restricted.
While it seems crude, the way we used to do it, the way the Soviets used to do it, the way China does it now, seems to work best for this kind of interest. You invest in a despot let them have their little fiefdom and you let them run what's theirs and you get to take what you think is yours.
Nation-building is hubris. Work with someone local who fits hand-in-glove.
Is the unstable "stability" worth 6T and thousands of soldiers' lives and many tens of thousands traumatized? Not to mention the losses from the locals. What was the human cost of Saddam in power vs the cost after toppling him?
> While it seems crude, the way we used to do it, the way the Soviets used to do it, the way China does it now, seems to work best for this kind of interest. While it seems crude, the way we used to do it, the way the Soviets used to do it, the way China does it now, seems to work best for this kind of interest.
Aside from ethical issues, the inevitable case is what they think is theirs and what you think is yours end up conflicting, which is how that strategy fell apart with the Soviets in Afghanistan. And with the US and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Among other places.
Bringing Saddam Hussein and the invasion of Iraq into the discussion is a distraction, as this is most clearly regarded as a separate conflict launched under the cover of an invasion of Afghanistan which was, unlike that in Iraq, a response to an actual attack and continuing threat. In addition, and per my previous comment, the acquiescence of Congress further demonstrated the limitations of its nominal power to veto such actions.
Eh, I think a few of your points are sort-of correct, but transformational goals could work if we were more willing to commit to manpower, occupation, hard measures, and direct control (not saying that we should, or that it fits with modern sensibilities).
On top of that, "preventing the production of terrorists" (to paraphrase) was a stated goal of Afghanistan and it doesn't seem obvious how it can be fulfilled with either the current outcome or an "invade, accomplish, withdraw" operation unless we intended to just entirely massacre the populace to the point that the nation becomes a giant wildlife reserve.
There are relatively few (if any) cases of forced national reform lasting 40+ years with the intent to have a relatively "free democracy" at the end so I'm also having trouble considering your contention about transformation proven. (Though I definitely concur a single birth to adult score of years seems an unlikely interval for success with half-measures.)
That was a European problem which Europeans should have solved by themselves. Why did we have to piss abound there when they could have managed it themselves?
Let's say something came up in Puerto Rico... and then we have Europe come in and fix things instead of the US, does that seem the way it should work?
That isn't fair assessment. Europeans have plenty of experience how they failed to manage fixing problems by wars. Also at that time, NATO expansion was the only option on the table, Washington was uneasy about the prospects of some independent european alliance influenced much by the newly unified Germany. So it was only natural they decided to come and showcase fixing problems in ex-yugoslavia.
By the way Europe is in fact fixing American problems, by dealing with of refugees from american (and russian) wars, at the price of political and cultural turmoil.
Exactly. Basketcase governments are products of basketcase societies. Go in and topple the government and you now have the impossible task of developing a sustainable high quality government on top of a low quality society/culture.
It's the same for Russia or Ukraine as it is for Afghanistan or Libya. These people have been under a totally different form of government where they had very little agency. The hubris of thinking, yeah, the CPSU (or Bath, etc.) is dissolved, democracy will take over, it's people's destiny!
When you've known nothing of democracy, it's a foreign concept. You need the culture around democracy to form for it to be successful.
Congress basically in practice abdicated that power with an incredibly broad AUMF 'war on terrorism .' I think there is even one from like cold war on the books.
I know the house voted to end them but the Senate didn't act?
> Let's go back to congress needing to authorize wars and give them sole war-powers
The issue there is the massive conflict of interest and legal bribery.
Members of congress are getting obscenely rich from the Military Industrial Complex and their "campaign contributions". Their bank accounts want more wars.
Presidents can use the power to declare war for political purposes, i.e. start a war after a scandal, or before an election, etc. They can also be bribed, just like the politicians in congress.
The constitution grants congress the power to declare war, congress being the representatives of the people of the states. It was never intended that a single person, the president, has the authority to launch an offensive war with another country.
I agree with you that the campaigns are financed in the U.S. amounts to legal bribery. Most other civilized countries outlaw or greatly curtail campaign donations from corporations, unions, and trade associations. Many also limit donations to offices you can vote on, subsidize donations with tax credits, limit the lengths of campaigns, and/or publicly fund political parties.
Until we get the big showdown about this in the Supreme Court, both the Executive and Legislative will continue to claim they have ultimate authority here.
> Members of congress are getting obscenely rich from the Military Industrial Complex and their "campaign contributions".
Please explain for me how that is so, without diverting into claiming that they're being handed tens of millions of dollars secretly under the table.
I'm familiar with how campaign contributions work and the legal regulations involved, including what they're allowed to do - and not do - with the money. How do campaign contributions from military industrial complex firms translate into Congressional members getting obscenely rich?
Every single Congressional member would have been better off buying any number of dozens of various traditional tech stocks than any of the military industrial stocks (Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, etc.).
> Please explain for me how that is so, without diverting into claiming that they're being handed tens of millions of dollars secretly under the table.
There are two aspects to this.
The first is campaign contributions. Recent US Presidential election campaigns have exceeded a billion dollars. House and Senate races have been millions to hundreds of millions, per election. The people "giving" this money are not doing so out of altruism. It's not secret money under the table, it's all open and disclosed, but nobody thinks it has no effect on behavior. At best the representatives are entirely scrupulous and never allow the money to affect their positions, but then the candidates with pro-corporate positions find it easier to raise money, the money allows them to buy more advertising, and the candidates who want to shovel tax dollars into corporate coffers win more elections.
The second is the revolving door. You go serve some time in Congress, do what the corporations want, and when you retire or fail to win re-election because your constituents got fed up with what you were doing, you have a cushy job paying six, seven, eight figures a year waiting for you after. Or that job goes to a member of your family while you're still in office.
People have made much about how the Pelosi fortune has grown in the last 20 years, but they seem to have overlooked the fact that they would actually have done better to just invest in the S&P500.
> we've thought continually we were dealing with another defeated Japan or defeated Germany --the enemy population would just comply to our wishes, so we kept on thinking we could "turn them into replicas of American government"
They did not "comply". They came to realize it was better to emulate the US:
> This is not to say that Japan remained fascist (as some left-wing commentators assert). It most obviously and manifestly did not remain fascist. Instead, various leaders who had earlier supported and even participated in fascism decided that liberal democracy was better for the country. One reason they made this decision is that the U.S. had just proven liberal democracy’s economic and military effectiveness by winning WW2. They almost certainly could have restored dictatorship in Japan — the U.S. was clearly willing to tolerate dictatorships among its Cold War allies in Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere — but they chose not to. Instead, they drew from a liberal democratic trend that had existed in Japan well before the military takeover of the 1930s.
Both Japan and Germany had liberal democratic histories before they got taken over by fascists, so it wasn't a stretch. Cultures based on clan/kinship tend to have higher corruption and lower stability:
> we've thought continually we were dealing with another defeated Japan or defeated Germany --the enemy population would just comply to our wishes, so we kept on thinking we could "turn them into replicas of American government"
You though, but you did not did.
In both prior cases US ran moderately competent occupation government, and by some accounts one better than their own.
The model US followed in Vietnam was not this. Ngo Dinh Diem was a Syngman Rhee 2.0, but even worse. Here, you can say Karzai was Syngman Rhee 3.0.
All shared a history of being overthrown because of progressing nationalist drift within their own power bases.
Those countries knew they would be treated as equals on the economic world forum, not puppet states for resource extraction.
The only remarkable thing is that we treated Japan so well, considering how its fellow far east countries were treated as client states or worse for so long.
I think it was latent guilt of using the nuke on them.
Japan had an industrial base... well, it had to in order to engage in a long fought war of attrition in all of the Pacific controlling and subjugating very large portions of the population and land area.
So they had an industrial base. No so much for (S) Korea and VietNam. They were very agrarian (like Japan before they built up their war machine). So their problem was peasant farmers with no land + a growing population on the brink of starvation.
US advisors made recommendations to alleviate this problem by doing land redistribution for tenant farmers. South VietNam would have none of that. Korea did appease the peasants albeit reluctantly so they avoided the worst.
That's actually a really interesting point. South Korea was actually steamrolled by the north, because the US made sure they had no independent way of defending themselves. The US pulled in the UNSC to fight on their own in Korea, while the Soviets had built up a strong local military in the North. Taiwan is now incapable to protect its own borders. They even had a nuclear weapons program in response to mainland China which the CIA infiltrated and shut down. Another example of a local military that was just steamrolled by an insurgency was the Iraqi military.
The US has a pretty good track record when it comes to building insurgencies though, remember that the Taliban were built and trained by ISI and the CIA. Iran had islamic groups that the Shah used to silence opposition forces. There's no way their training and equipment wasn't done in coordination with their US partners given how much of a puppet the Shah was. Or take a look at a lot of the groups that were part of the opposition in Syria.
I wonder if there's any analysis why the US has been so good at building and training insurgency groups, but so bad at making local armies to protect their own territorial borders.
Who says they are heading toward democracy at all? Do you stop at fascism along the way? Afghanistan was essentially our state. It was beginning to prosper and experience the rights and freedoms already established by our presence--why do "they" need to create a government if we already have one that works and that their people seemed to like?
We should open up to voluntarily annexing states like Afghanistan and Puerto Rico instead of continuing to drool over some fuedal age government philosophy. Invite people in. The current system of fight-and-flight is looking a bit dated.
Puerto Rico and Afghanistan have virtually nothing in common. Puerto Rico is not next to Russia and the Middle East, and doesn't cost hundreds of billions to keep stable.
It's hard for us to admit it. My own journey, after spending 7+ years living abroad, and recently completing a (most epic yet) cross-country roadtrip, it is clear that America is in decline due to generations of mal-investment. We've squandered blood and treasure in quixotic and wrong-headed misadventures and dumped gargantuan amounts of money into nothing but destruction. We've been led by bravado and glory, by craven merchants of death, and greedy megacorporations with no scruples. Our political leaders are corrupt, our institutions rotting. We should have printed out all those dollars and just set them on fire for goddsakes.
The partisan bickering over just 1.6 trillion in infrastructure spending, after having lit another 3 trillion on fire to prop up the stock and housing markets for another few years, losing money hand over fist, electric grids going down at the slightest breath, and overall decay and mismanagement of all our common infrastructure...America is past its peak, stumbling now, and all that remains is angry tribalism and finger-pointing. We can't even unite against a deadly enemy that is impossible to love or anthropomorphize--a virus.
We failed to invest in fundamentals for so long....
On some days I find myself, as an American, hoping we split up. We don't really want to live together anymore. We hate each other. Not a dollar for those bastards' kids!
I dont think the US can help war mongering. Its the basis on which it was formed and came to be a superpower through war. It figures. Almost every US diplomatic relationship is tied to their military in some shape or form. Which is absurd.
But yes. The US has been in decline for a while, possibly propped up by tech and financial markets but there too is a paper fire. The rest of the world has the skills to run their own financial markets and tech but without the excess central bank printed money that passes as capital in that part of the world.
The solution really is simple though. Stop spending so much money on the military, get your house in order, and make some real friends. Sortie when a real war is threatening peace. Might take a while to do but its simple and easy.
True universal healthcare would more than likely save the USA money, not require more spending. That European countries have universal healthcare at all is that after WA2 they couldn’t afford accessible private systems like the USA has been able to dump a lot of money into.
The USA will get universal healthcare when they can no longer afford their crazy healthcare system anymore. So maybe this excessive spending on wars will bring us closer to, not farther away from, universal healthcare.
China and the USA are responsible for roughly half of global Green House Gas emissions.
A few years ago China pledged to invest trillions into environmental protection over the next decades. We can only hope that the USA takes similar steps. Both countries can afford it and both have access to know how other countries have build up in this effort.
When you look at who's polluting and who's emissions are on an upward trajectory, there's one obvious country that's actively working against the environment. China's emissions aren't slowing down. Coal is incredibly cheap when there's no carbon tax or emission standards. Comparing the US[1] and China[2], the US has:
- Decreasing per capita emissions in the US starting in 1973 (-27%)
- A decrease in the countries emission starting in 2007 (-13%)
Meanwhile for the same period China has had
- a 7x increase per capita since 1973 (+532%)
- 48% increase for its global emissions since 2007
So it is possible to drastically reduce our carbon footprint thanks to innovation and smarter power generation.
There is a lot of headroom until China even reaches US levels of pollution per capita though. The USA is emitting ~2.5x as much GHG per capita than China.
Also China is the workbench of the world, other nations just shift their GHG load there, first and foremost the US.
At $100/ton (the currently accepted rate), that would have paid for the removal of 64 gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere. Roughly two years worth of emissions.
Although at that scale, you wonder if you could get down to $10/ton... in which case you'd have removed all of the carbon emissions from 2001 until now.
It isn't that we can't afford to mitigate climate change. We cannot mitigate climate change, period. In other words, you could throw all the money on the planet at it and it would not make a dent. No purported solution passes the math and physics tests.
It's easy to make a mess. This can be done with very little energy, resources and time. On the other hand, cleaning-up the mess takes far more energy, time and resourced than what went into creating it in the first place.
That's the problem.
We don't have it.
Energy, resources or time.
You are far more likely to kill everything on this planet than to fix climate change.
That may or may not be true right now. Was it true 10 years ago? 20? 30? There exists a point at which it was not true, and we're talking about taking that investment over a 20+ year historical period, not as a lump sum right now.
Lots of fossil fuel aligned people have pivoted from "everything is fine" to "there's nothing we can do now", and echoing the latter might be factually correct, but in the context it smacks of disingenuity.
There might be an escape velocity to this: as technology evolves it is easier to clean pollution, and perhaps the innovation moves faster than the added pollution. So maybe the best time to start cleaning is 30 years into the future?
It's a nice saying... but may I push back? Maybe it's like saying instead of insisting to keep a positive balance, take a debt and go study in a callege. Then profit for the rest of your life?
Not even going into the issue that we don't have time to "go to college" before this needs to be fixed, what actually is the "college" in your analogy? And the balance is already negative.
Restrictions on pollution would hinder economic development, which in turn would hinder scientific progress, so we will not invent new effective methods to fight pollution. "Debt" is unrestrained economic development, "college" is the research and added economic capacity that comes out of it. And profit are the new methods for removing pollution.
But I don't necessarily believe in it. The point here is that, IMHO, for every, motto-like, populist data-less claim why we should fight pollution, one can easily come up with equivalently populist data less claim why we should not bother with clime change. In isolation from supporting data these two claims are equally unsubstantiated. If there is some concrete data to share please do so, otherwise it's an echo chamber where people would just upvote what they agree with and downvote what they disagree, without any concern for the actual facts brought out in the claim, it's not a argument taking place in the comments it just people preferences showing up in their votings.
What I heard from the news is that they claim the temperature will raise by 1.5 degree in a near future. Unfortunatly I didn't read the report and don't know what are the proposed policy steps. If you or someone else can summarize (without populism or moto like claims), what's their proposed solutions are and what are the risks, that might be of a big service to the community. Since then we ca exchange data based opinions if the proposed solution seems viable or not and that can move a discussion forward.
Last time, I had a vacation and was able to listen to a in depth discussion of political steps to solve climate change was this https://youtu.be/nNIcHIjFNxs
At the time my impression was that it is very hard to make a real progress in this.
Every complicated problem has a simple solution that is wrong. It is just to say, your metaphora might be beautify and simple but in your comment there is nothing to add about how valid is it.
Wind and solar are cheaper and can be brought online as fast as we can build it... Nuclear has massive startup costs and takes a hella long time to build out. Solar efficiency had been undergoing a an exponential (!!!) drop in price per kilowatt hour. Think of it as Moore's law, but for energy. Comparing solar to nuclear at this point is sorta like saying you don't need one of these gosh darned desktop computers when you've got a perfectly good giant room full of multi million dollar IBM mainframe that you bought just twenty years ago... Exponential price curves should cause one to stay flexible on assumptions.
> Wind and solar are cheaper and can be brought online as fast as we can build it
I love wind and solar. I built a 13 kW array on our property and will likely expand it to 20 kW next year.
However, even if we deploy the most optimal forms of wind and solar energy at a global scale --forms that have yet to be invented-- this will not be enough to stop or reverse atmospheric CO2 concentration. In fact, even if we do this, it will continue to increase exponentially until such time as the planet --through weather-- sticks its finger on the problem.
This is NOT my conclusion. This came out of a study where Google researchers --who were convinced renewable energy sources was the way to go-- set out to once-and-for-all show the world the path. They were stunned when they discovered just how wrong they were. To their credit, they published the paper and admitted just how wrong they were. This is real science, not hand-wavy stuff. Anyone with the appropriate science background can go through the paper, study the data and reproduce their claims. I certainly did. This paper is what opened my eyes to the nonsense we are being sold. It led to spending over a year trying to understand the reality of the problems we face.
Still gotta try, though. Solar is already a great deal cheaper than it was in 2014 when that article was published; by more than 50%, in fact. And there's a new X-Prize for C02 removal.
There's a number of other pieces of the puzzle that need urgent action. Cleaning up international shipping is a big one which comes to mind... And reducing driving is another big one.
Cost isn't the issue. It's physics. The paper isn't about economics, it's about the physics, the science. And what they found is that claiming that renewables will do anything at all for atmospheric CO2 concentration is, well, as false a statement as anyone can make.
The study including looking at deploying solar and wind world-wide with the most advanced versions of these technologies. They determined that not only would this not stop atmospheric CO2 concentration increases, it would continue to rise exponentially.
Arguing for solar and wind to "save the planet" is the equivalent of being an anti-vaxer and not taking a vaccine in the face of a global pandemic. Even worse than that, it's like believing that drinking bleach will battle the virus. In other words, if you do the math, the real science, it is complete nonsense. The idea simply isn't supported by the scientific realities of the matter.
On the other items.
Yes, container ships burn bunker fuel, perhaps the nastiest stuff you can burn. It's amazing to me that politicians wage battles against straws and NOBODY talks about bunker fuel. It goes to show you that the only things that matter at the political matter are simple messages for simple-minded voters who can keep the politicians floating this nonsense in office through their easy-to-buy votes. Once you detach from ideology the whole thing looks like a big huge stinking mess.
> There's no silver bullet, and we need urgent action on many fronts. But things will be worse if we simply despair and do nothing.
I would put it differently.
First, we need to stop thinking we have the ability to control a planetary-scale problem. We cannot do it. At all. Even if we left the planet --all seven billion of us-- it would take about 50,000 years for atmospheric CO2 to come down by 100 ppm.
These X prizes are neat and all, but, in this case, they are far more likely to be marketing opportunities for those getting behind them than anything else. If they are even mildly intelligent they likely know the score. Nobody is going to win any of these prizes unless there's marketing value --rather than a scientifically sound actual solution.
Driving our limitation are things like the principle of conservation of energy. Put in relevant terms: We can't fix a mess with less energy than that which went into creating it.
We have people claiming we can reduce atmospheric CO2 by 100 ppm in just 50 years. That is a thousand times faster than the natural rate of change. I am not sure we have the energy and resources needed to make something like that happen, even if it were possible. The whole thing is almost laughable.
I urge you to get on Amazon and order a CO2 meter. Then go around taking reading. What you will learn will astound you. In a nutshell, we have been living in 600 to 1,000 ppm CO2 environments, likely for centuries. The ~400 ppm number quoted by those pushing a sky is falling narrative are average atmospheric readings at who knows what location and altitude. Measure CO2 in your home, apartment and office. Measure it at your neighbors and friends. You will most-definitely be surprised. And then, the question you should ask is simple: We have been living in high CO2 ppm environments all of our lives...the sky has not fallen and people have not turned into mush. Why are we being misled?
Well, first, I read a very different conclusion from the paper... They say, for example:
"That realization prompted us to reconsider the economics of energy. What’s needed, we concluded, are reliable zero-carbon energy sources so cheap that the operators of power plants and industrial facilities alike have an economic rationale for switching over soon—say, within the next 40 years."
In other words, it's absolutely an economics question. It's also a policy question: Subsidies and penalties can radically change the economic realities for power plant operators. They're saying it's a very hard road. But notably, their graphs are not delta functions: There's paths between the best case and worst case scenarios, and excellent progress on the renewables front can, indeed, change the direction of the curve. Pulling carbon back to pre-industrial levels absolutely requires active sequestration, though, and there are efforts on that front, though the second law of thermodynamics tells us it's a hard road. But again, some progress is better than none.
Your last 'graf sounds like unmitigated tinfoilhat-ism, I'm sorry to say. We should absolutely expect fluctuations in co2 measurements based on geography and proximity to large volumes of co2-spewing vehicles. There are standards for the calculation of average co2 ppm, which are helpful for knowing the overall state of things, and trends over time.
They set out to prove that renewables was the way. They discovered they were wrong. That is a paradigm-shattering conclusion. To this day we hear incessant talk about renewables "saving the planet". This is nonsense.
The only problem I have with the paper is that they did not follow this conclusion with a real study of the plausibility of any solution on a human time scale. They say things like having to capture carbon and have better power plants in 40 years. None of it is correlated to actual realizable effects at scale.
> Your last 'graf sounds like unmitigated tinfoilhat-ism
That isn't MY graphic! That's from the 800,000 ice core atmospheric sample data. Here:
If you are going to all this tin-foil it means negating all science on the subject. This data is incredibly accurate and reliable. One of my first questions when finding this data set was the simplest of inquiries: Can ice core atmospheric data from 800,000 years ago be accurate? Well, it turns out, yes, it is. I found and read papers on the subject. It's fascinating technology actually.
The statement I made was that solar and wind --renewables-- can't help us and are pretty much an empty pursuit as it pertains to "saving the planet". These researchers went into it CONVINCED renewables was the way and conducted this research to, as they said, once and for all show the world. What they discovered is they were as wrong as one could be. Renewables are a waste of time, money and resources. They are good and very much justified for other reasons, just not anything related to climate change or atmospheric CO2 concentration.
As I said, I have a 13 kW solar array, soon to grow to 20 kW. I am under no delusion about what it is for. It serves no purpose whatsoever as it pertains to climate change. This is particularly true if you consider the entire installation, which includes a large ground-mounted structure, concrete footings, etc. I sometimes wonder how much carbon was produced to go from minerals on the ground to a structure on my property with a theoretical 13 kW peak generation capacity. Different subject.
Well, being that the argument is grounded in physics and the math that accompanies the analysis, this is a time-independent truth.
To state the problem more accurately: We cannot do a thing about climate change and atmospheric CO2 concentration at anything even remotely resembling a human time scale.
The numbers being thrown about for some of these would-be solutions are just plain silly. 50 years? For a planetary scale problem? Yeah, sure.
Again, one must understand that it was absolutely possible for us to add massive amounts of CO2 in short order. Removing it isn't quite as simple. We were able to add it because burning tens of billions of barrels of oil every year is easy. Any fool with a match can start a forest fire. It takes millions --billions-- of times more energy to reverse the effect of what started with a simple match.
That's the context. Every purported solution must pass the physics test. None of them do. Small scale, sure. Planetary scale. Not one.
Every time I look at this I am reminded of the joke one of my physics professors used to tell us with sometimes annoying frequency. He would start on a new problem, chuckle, and say: Assume a cow is a uniform sphere of milk one meter in diameter. His point was that reality was always far more complex than what we had to do in order to learn and explore principles.
The very first problem is that we know, without a doubt, what the baseline is for affecting a (roughly) 100 ppm reduction in atmospheric CO2: 50,000 years. However, this baseline has a pretty tough requirement: Humanity has to leave the planet or the clock does not start.
If humanity left the planet tomorrow, we know that, on average, it will take about 50K years for that 100 ppm drop. This is roughly what people are saying they can do in just 50 years with various magical solutions. In other words, they are claiming that they can do a THOUSAND times better than the rate of change that would correspond to humanity not existing at all.
How do we know this? We have 800,000 years of very accurate atmospheric data taken from ice core samples. In other words, we can see what the planet was doing when humanity's influence on CO2 and the climate was so insignificant we might as well have been on Mars.
If, for example, someone claims that we can "fight" climate change (I love the hubris) by installing solar panels and wind power generator everywhere, well, they have to show how this is better than humanity leaving the planet. No hand-wavy stuff, real science, math, physics. These ideas do not survive the test of hitting the realities of physics inside an Excel spreadsheet.
You don't have to take my word on it for this particular case:
This is the paper that launched me into a year-long quest to understand what was going on. It is real science, reproducible by anyone with the skill set, and nothing even close to hand-wavy bullshit. To paraphrase, the conclusion they reached goes something like this:
"Even if we deployed the most optimal versions of all renewable energy technologies. Meaning, versions of all technologies that have yet to be invented. Not only would this not reverse or stop atmospheric CO2 accumulation. CO2 levels would continue to increase exponentially."
These researchers went into this work convinced renewables were the way to do it and they set out to prove it once and for all. I give them huge credit for having the guts to communicate that their bubble was popped by their own research and that, no, this idea is nothing less than utopia.
We don't even have to stop there. The chart in this article, when combined with the other data, absolutely made the issue crystal clear for me:
Remember what I said about the baseline? 100 ppm in 50,000 years, if humanity left the planet? Anything less than that is pointless as it will be in a range between never affecting CO2 concentration to taking far longer than 50,000 years for a 100 ppm reduction.
The chart in this article shows each country's contribution to the CO2 problem.
US 15%
China 28%
India 7%
Russia 5%
Europe about 7%
The rest close to 40%
If the United States were to beam up into space tomorrow --we evaporate from the surface of this planet and all of our technology and machinery disappears-- you are still pumping 85% of total CO2 into the atmosphere. In other words, nothing will change. And atmospheric CO2 continues to rise exponentially.
In other words, if someone were to propose that we install solar panels on every single home in the US. The question they have to answer is:
How is that going to be better than if the US simply evaporated and we stopped contributing 15% to the global problem?
It isn't! Which means it isn't a solution. It is, at best, hubris and, at worst, criminally negligent or irresponsible to propose consuming a nation's treasure on something that is as pointless as can be.
OK, now China and the US are beamed-up by Captain Kirk. Same issue. Now we are down to 57%. Won't fix the problem at all.
If we all left it gets down to 0% and it takes 50,000 years for a 100 ppm reduction.
Anything LESS than that scenario will take longer or do nothing at all.
That's where the impossibility of things like "save the planet" or "affect climate change" or "become carbon neutral" come into the proper lens. These are all fantasies. Sorry. Anyone wishing to challenge this has to prove their purported solution can pass the physics test at a planetary scale. Showing that it works when we assume a cow to be a uniform one meter diameter sphere of milk isn't equivalent to planetary scale in the real world.
In the real world we have things like the massive forest fires burning in nearly every continent every year. In California we now have a fire that is likely to contribute more carbon in a few weeks than the entire gasoline-based ground transportation fleet in the US in an entire year. Last I checked it was only 31% contained. There are massive underground coal fires that have been burning for decades, even centuries in some cases. That's reality. Not the utopia we are being sold.
What to do then?
Well, we clean-up our act for other reasons. No, we are not going to "save the planet" at all. We don't have that power. We clean-up our act because it is better than being absolute pigs and causing more damage. We also clean-up our act because this is part of learning to live with what we cannot alter.
I urge anyone who think they know anything about this subject to get on Amazon right now and buy a CO2 meter. I have several. Go around your home, apartment, your friends and neighbors places, the mall, your car, etc. Measure and take notes. What you should discover is that, while atmospheric CO2 concentration is --depending on how and where you measure it-- in the order of 400 ppm, we have been living with much higher levels for a very long time, likely centuries. You will discover levels in the order of 650 ppm in your home and other homes. You will measure somewhere around 1,000 ppm in your car. It will be similar at the office and at the store.
The interesting thing is that the sky hasn't fallen and we have not turned into goo. We can, apparently, live just fine in higher CO2 content. Ideal? Perhaps not. I'd like to see a study that determines if we have an evolutionary adaptation for an optimal CO2 concentration range. I don't know of any, other than fear-mongering stuff that twenty years ago, was claiming we would suffer mass extinction by now.
None of this is to say that climate change isn't real and that we have not contributed to make things worse. It is very real. It has been for billions of years. And, yes, we managed to accelerate the rate of increase by burning the equivalent of perhaps 25,000 to 50,000 years of trees and bio matter in just a few centuries. That's how we did it. And we can't reverse that, not on a human time scale.
I continue to be baffled by how otherwise intelligent people just take what they are told --about any subject really-- and do not bother to confirm before parroting the stuff far and wide. This is not how we solve problems.
Especially true given water vapor is a more potent ghg increasing with each upward temperature tick, in a way that's not linearly reversible from linear co2 reduction.
Probably the only way that could potentially fix things is direct temperature manipulation schemes. There's a lot of them that have been proposed.
Worth noting that the major economies in Asia aren't doing much of anything tangible for co2 reduction. The EU has basically the world's smallest petroleum industry so it's no sacrifice for them to push climate change measures. The US will effectively be transferring huge amounts of its economic wealth to other petroleum countries who don't care. Ugly all around.
Point is entrepreneurs should focus on direct temperature manipulation at this point if we really want to solve the problem.
> Point is entrepreneurs should focus on direct temperature manipulation at this point if we really want to solve the problem.
While I appreciate your perspective, the hard and cold reality of the situation is that it is illusory to think we can affect something of this magnitude. Not only is it a planetary scale problem, it is also something that, just from the standpoint of conservation of energy, is impossible for us to address.
The principle is brutally simple. To state it in relevant terms: It cannot take LESS energy to solve a problem than that which went into creating it.
To further lend context, it is important to understand how the planet dealt with this when humanity was insignificant. We have this data going back 800,000 years. This comes from highly reliable ice core atmospheric sample data. Here:
And so, in rough terms, it took about 25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase and about 50,000 years for the same decrease in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Any inquisitive mind would want to know how this happened. How did CO2 concentration increase and decrease? The answers are relatively simple. We were not around (or we were insignificant), so it wasn't humanity, not going back 800,000 years.
The increase, among other things, was caused by massive forest fires rolling through entire continent. Without modern fire fighting technology, these fires burned and rolled through the land constantly. The only thing that would stop them would be running out of fuel or heavy rains.
The decrease was mostly a combination of having burned off enough carbon stores that rains, hurricanes, cyclones --the weather-- over tens of thousands of years, precipitated CO2. Forests grew once more, capturing more carbon...only to burn again at some point and repeat the cycle.
How, then, were we able to influence this in a few centuries?
Again, simple: We burned the equivalent of unimaginably massive forests at a much faster rate than the natural order of things. We did this by burning oil. One gallon of petroleum is said to have required about 100 tons of plants and biomatter. Today we are burning oil at a rate of nearly 100 million barrels per day, or 35 billion barrels per year. One barrel is equivalent to just over 31 gallons. Which means that burning a barrel of oil is like burning 3,100 tons of plants and biomatter. This isn't an exact calculation, of course. It does serve to get a sense of proportion about what we are discussing. The scale is absolutely unimaginable.
And so, while the planet experienced these ~100K year cycles without us around, when we started to use oil we got to the point where we effectively burned the equivalent of entire forests in a single day...every day...every year...for decades, centuries. That's how we were able to change the upward rate of change of atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Reversing it is a very different story. Making a mess is easy. Any fool can light up 30 gallons of gasoline and make an absolute mess. All it takes is a match. In sharp contrast to that --and going back to the concept of conservation of energy-- you simply cannot reverse the process by expending less energy than what it took to create it in the first place. Except that this energy isn't the energy of the match, but rather the energy stored in the 30 gallons of gasoline that went up in smoke. In reality, once dispersed, the byproducts of this combustion are nearly impossible to contain and revert. It would take an unimaginable amount of energy and resources to reverse the effects of 100 million barrels of oil used per day. And we do that each and every day and have been burning this stuff for centuries at an increasing rate.
This isn't to say we should do nothing at all. What I am saying is that we are having the wrong conversations because we have allowed politicians and various forces to make a cult out of this thing. Very little of what is being put out on this every day is true. We can't reverse this in 50 years. We can't do it in a century. This will take tens of thousands of years. In other words, it is likely outside a human time scale.
What to do then? Well, we need to start having the right conversations. We need to start figuring out how to live with this and survive. We are not going to fix it. We need to adapt to it. That's where our technological focus should be, not in magic pixie dust to "save the planet". If we persist, we will not only lose the opportunity to adapt, we will likely risk killing all life on earth through a hairbrained scheme to save a planetary scale ecosystem that we have the hubris of thinking we can control.
Every time I post about this I get eviscerated with downvotes and sometimes comments. And yet, not one person ever takes the time to read and review the sources I provide, go through some super simple math and come back with something like "Hey, I think you missed this point". I want to be wrong about this. Personal insults and downvotes don't serve any purpose at all other than to reveal the intense indoctrination people have been subjected to. Yes, climate change is real. Yes, we made it worse. No, we can't fix it.
I don't disagree with you and strongly agree we're having the wrong conversations. But in the spirit of thinking... 2 questions for you...
What is impossible about direct temperature manipulation schemes? I'm referring to proposals like building reflectors to directly lower the earth's temperature. There's nothing in principle preventing this from directly cooling the planet.
Also, what do you know about the physics of CO2 absorption/re-emission? CO2 absorbs what exactly? To start it's the 15 micron band. It is infrared radiation on the longer, weaker side of IR. How much heat does 15 microns contribute to, and what types of molecules [eg ice or water, or only atmosphere?] can actually interact with 15 microns vs. being transparent to it? Since water vapor already absorbs at 15 microns, how does that modulate the effect of CO2? Does CO2 even re-emit 15 microns back to earth, or does it just cause co2 to wiggle a little bit (it definitely causes it to wiggle, but what frequency does it re-emit, if any?) Quantifying heat caused by 15 microns is not something you will find information on, even though the entire carbon based global warming arguments depend entirely on it. But there is another relevant point to be made:
15 micron is in the terahertz spectrum specifically. This spectrum is notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to build any sort of transmitter or receiver for, mainly because the air/water vapor simply absorb it in a short distance. To this effect I've heard one college physics professor who publishes his lectures on youtube argue that 15 microns is 99.9% already absorbed in the atmosphere by such effects [1] [eg adding more CO2 will make effectively no difference at all; it's all absorbed already]. We do know the main atmospheric window where energy can reflect back into space does not include the 15 microns band [e.g. CO2's absorption profile doesn't fall in the main atmospheric window]. My question for you is how much time have you spent thinking about absorption/EM spectrum based arguments that get at the actual mechanism of how carbon based global warming is supposed to work? Most people have not. I don't have all the answers, but the physics actually seems to imply it's possible if not likely we could be completely wrong in our assumptions about CO2 and global warming. I would challenge you to come up with a rebuttal to that, in the same way folks have not come up with a rebuttal to the argument you posted. So yes, we're having the wrong conversations.
As an alternate potential explanation consistent with the physics, CFCs do absorb in the atmospheric window, and even though they were banned decades ago it turns out they are on the rise again [2]
> What is impossible about direct temperature manipulation schemes? I'm referring to proposals like building reflectors to directly lower the earth's temperature. There's nothing in principle preventing this from directly cooling the planet.
I don't think anyone can name even one project of non-trivial scale that successfully controlled a natural environment. I am talking about something of the scale of a small to mid island. Something that might give support for a project hundreds of thousand, millions, tens of millions of times larger.
Wanting to control anything at a planetary scale is pure hubris. C'mon. As I like to say, if we listen to the fools pushing these ideas we are far more likely to kill all life on earth than to save it.
And then there are truly perplexing every-day things that provide further proof that controlling anything is hopeless. Our town is going through and repaving a bunch of streets and avenues. There's nothing --absolutely nothing-- wrong with them. I've lived here over 30 year. The streets are damn-near perfect.
Just a block from my house, they tore-up about half a mile out of this avenue and replaced it with a black tar covering. Black as can be. The prior surface was mid gray. I used to take walks down that avenue. Not any more. The heat emanating from the black surface is impossible to describe. Every single street being repaved is getting the black tar treatment. How can we possibly hope to improve anything at a planetary scale when we fuck up neighborhoods just by repaving streets.
Total U.S. assets amount to about $225 trillion. Spending 1/700th of that per year for the past 20 years to protect those assets seems a reasonable investment. That’s not to say this money was spent wisely, in hindsight (which is always 20/20).
I hope one day we will come to some form of collective enlightenment.
I have always wondered, from an evolutionary perspective, what is the underlying thing that encourages the emergent collectivism of unicellular oragnisms that eventually gave rise to us? Could that be something related to consciousness in a way we do not yet understand?
Would it be possible to replicate a phenomenology similiar to that which drives billions of cells to collaborate (and act together to help "the organism" to stay alive) to occur at the species level so there'll be no more wars and conflicts as we help one another to live more fulfilling lives? (e.g. through the utilization of psychedelics and BCI?)
I think what made humans special is that perhaps we're already half-way there. Unlike other animals, we collabrate with one another at a much greater scale, and have accomplished so many unthinkable things so far.
We are perhaps at a unique point in history after enjoying so long the state of being post-animals that we're finally starting to reflect what it means to go beyond all the humans conflicts and shenanigans.
The problem is none of the other initiatives sell. Reflexive war is easy, unquestioned. In the wake of 9/11 it was unpatriotic to ask whether the war was worthwhile or expansions of executive power such as the Authorization for Use of Military Force were justifiable.
Mention infrastructure, healthcare, or clean energy and suddenly a million special interests pop up and the deficit suddenly starts to matter.
It's hard for me to believe that a modern brick school costs the same as 1.667 miles of concrete pavement, but it does not change the point he makes. It just makes concrete pavement sound really, really expensive.
Remind ourselves that these unquestioned, unaccounted, massive outlays occurred at major tipping points for global warming. We lost an extra ten years of funding to help prevent an actual existential threat to our existence.
I feel this is not as simple as this. It's a nice appeal but very removed from reality.
If you didn't have strong enough army to protect you, then you might loose, schools hospitals and what not... Unfortunatly, in a real world a war is not a maybe question but a when question. The question is what amount of defense expenditure is adequate? And that a political question, with no right or wrong answers that for the voters to decide.
I hope humanity lives in peace some day and there will be no more need for armies but that is a distant future. Until then, you do need an armed force to protect all the good things the free society has created, how much force you need vs civilian infra? An open question...
> If you didn't have strong enough army to protect you, then you might loose, schools hospitals and what not...
Who the hell is going to attack us before we can mount a response?! We lost a mere 3000 people and launched into 20 years of madness and insanity, all because we were unwilling to blame a president and a political party who was asleep at the wheel, who didn't even bother to pay attention to the terrorist attacks just a few years earlier. And then we let them overreact and waste how many more lives, for nothing? For absolute nothing?
I'm sorry, but your comment makes me absolute furious. It's so completely thoughtless and ignorant and exists only to service those who get wealthy off the blood of our soldiers.
We have lost more than a half million Americans to a pandemic that--given our prior leadership in the area--shouldn't have taken more than a few thousands, where the hell is our response to stop that tragedy again?
We need to cut the military to a tiny time fraction of its current level, almost nothing. Certainly no more than any other country. Redirect allll that spending into something productive.
Not sure how this relates to what I wrote? Apparently USA voters do think the spending is adequate... or do you have a better way to decide on this? On a tangential: We can also try to compare the cost of 1 mile of subway in NY vs 1 mile in Shanghai. I didn't check but I would assume NY cost would be more than double. Services in US cost a lot. US innovates and a lot of other countries copy... while it seems that China spending is not that far behind US.
> Apparently USA voters do think the spending is adequate
I'm not sure how well the federal government reflects the will of the people, given how campaigns are funded here, using means which are illegal in most other countries. Not to mention the gerrymandering, where politicians are choosing voters instead of the other way around. I don't know if the federal government was originally meant to be responsive to the people. That's why there's no facility for the people to directly propose amendments or vote on referendums at the federal level, like there is in other more democratic countries. For a long time state legislators elected members of congress and the president, not the people.
You mentioned U.S. voters... Perhaps it is a good idea to have a national referendum before launching a war. Democracy is a good thing, right? I believe other countries would do this, Switzerland for example. Maybe even go one better, and have a GoFundMe to pay for it. And volunteer soldiers to fight. It would then be interesting to see how many people want to waste their money and lives halfway across the world killing people who just want to be left alone, but are in the way of someone over here making more money.
Some say, democracy is very bad, yet it is still better than any other alternative. So, for the lack of a better alternative I have only so much data points.
Yes, referendums etc.. could be a reasonable propose, things evolve so maybe one day we will have something of this sort in the US as well. Time will show!
"Actually you don't need US's level of spending if you are not "actively" into wars like ones in the middle east."
That's your believe but sorry, I don't want to take this claim on the face value. Maybe you're right, maybe not, I believe that's a complicated issue for sure...
One could claim you would need to spend much more were you not involved in these conflicts... each war has it's own reason and own goals and the decision to enter a war is weighted in geopolitically economically etc..and then the elected president makes this decision. Now, what I do have an evidence for, is that politically, the votes are probably split since there is pretty much status quo on that for many years and many administrations...
do they? is there a transparent way to vote against it when both parties big parties support it tacitly if not publicly. I vote third party every election but they never when because they don't have the money that comes from donations of big lobbying industries like military contractors oil pharma etc
Lobbying is only so much effective as the benefits outweigh the damage to a politician. In our tight election cycles the marginal differences are important, I would believe that politicians would jump to grab as much votes as possible to tilt the balance only even slightly. Maybe there is actually more support for large military spending than it appears to you?
Nope its not a wedge issue so they wont fight over it especally as they profit from it. The left will pay lip service to halting forever wars, but will sign the next military procurement bill because it ostensibly brings in vague nonspecific 'jobs' to their district. The right on the other hand, just gets hard at the idea of more and bigger guns and signs it without needing a excuse.
So to summarize: your are saying on the one hand, for one or the other reason, the voters decide not to punish politicians that support military spending, on the other hand, politician rely onobbist to help them get elected and so don't do much about spending.
China already spends approximately as much as the US on its military when you adjust for the difference in income/salaries (which is a large share of US military expenditures). By the end of this decade it'll be well beyond the US.
"China Outspends the U.S. on Defense? Here’s the Math."
"Factoring in purchasing power and personnel costs leads to a surprising conclusion."
This argument dissolves under even the lightest scrutiny.
Let's assume for a second that there is a dollar amount to "underwriting global free trade" (spurious to begin with). What actually is that dollar amount? Is it 3x more than what we're spending? 10x less? How could we ever know?
As it turns out, whatever we are currently spending, that's the amount required. We could double the number of aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, jet fighters, missiles, spy satellites, military bases; we could start another war, another engagement, another "peacekeeping mission," do another few "surgical strikes"... And yep, that would be exactly what's required for freedom.
If I assert that American military spending is wasteful, you implying that I think doubling current spending would still be exactly what's required for freedom is a highly uncharitable interpretation of what I wrote.
Setting that aside, to put it in HN terms: imagine nontechnical people at your company comparing the wildly disproportionate relative costs of two IT projects, but without comparing the relative scopes of said projects. That would make for a poor foundation from which to either justify or criticize existing budget allocations.
That's what happens on HN every single time the subject arises.
'American military budgets are bigger than everyone else's' ergo 'American military budgets are far too big.' But it doesn't logically follow.
Power projection is exponentially more difficult and complex than homeland defense.
Yes, there's waste, and yes, it could be run more efficiently and at a lower cost, but it's worth noting that the other points of comparison (other nations) also contain no shortage of waste, and in some cases proportionally more. And slashing overhead to the absolute bare minimum possible is not the kind of risk management one would prioritize first in a system with an incredibly damaging failure state. (Disclaimer so it's more difficult to misstate my position: I believe that waste that is illegal should be punished criminally, and all other bad-faith waste that is political should be punished politically, and we should consider enacting laws to make such bad-faith waste illegal.)
Meaningful conclusions can't be reached by virtue of looking at relative costs while wrongly assuming you have a working knowledge of what they respectively achieve. This is what non-technical people do to technical people all the time, HN laments it, and then turns around and does it in many other spheres.
The military budgets of most nations are to provide some degree of homeland security, sometimes a little regional policing, and sometimes whatever extra is required to satisfy the political needs of their alliance leader. And tthat's about it.
Nobody else comes remotely close to being able to guarantee that an oil tanker can transit the Strait of Hormuz and sell barrels across the globe to multiple nations which have hated each other for centuries (or longer), and worse: to multiple nations which have competing and conflicting geopolitical imperatives. And it's not just oil, this applies to virtually all (non-sanctioned) nations and goods that aren't manufactured in their nation of consumption, using domestically-sourced materials and processes.
It simply isn't comparable.
It's worth remembering what the world looked like when countries which depended heavily on raw materials and trade developed their military capabilities precisely to secure those things, because without it their survival was in jeopardy. When a nation depends on those things for mere survival, its use of force doctrines eventually evolve resemble those of a cornered animal.
With the notable (and now obsolete) exception of securing an oil supply and the thread of the Soviet Union, the US does not depend on anyone else for its survival.
I think that we have a lot of people either unaware of how things worked prior to 1944, or holding the mistaken assumption that the underpinnings of our global framework exist either by happenstance or as the result of some kind of global enlightenment, as if human nature has finally changed for once.
There's also an implicit assumption made that one merely spends more money to beat other countries at shooting wars, countries which spent less and were therefore ill-equipped to compete. That assumption is reasonable in that it's based on millennia of recorded history, but faulty in that it ignores how the world has worked since 1944.
Yes, the United States has required countries to develop their military capacity sufficient to alleviate relatively minor regional issues (e.g., JSDF), or to create a shared purpose (e.g., NATO), but for the last ~77 years the United States has almost single-handedly created the conditions in which global free trade has been achieved for the first time ever, and the military has been central to imposing the conditions necessary to achieve it.
And before anyone asserts that pirates are a relic of centuries past, or that nations no longer desire to even engage in such tactics, this kind of thing regularly happens even under trade conditions imposed by the world's only superpower:
One could claim, as USA economy is disproportionately large, we have more things to protect and so less room for error. How about comparison by GDP spending?
In terms of cutting costs, the way we exited Afghanistan is the best way to do it. Pull out overnight, abandon all the equipment, and the rapid takeover by the Taliban means we don't need to keep running bombing missions to support a slowly retreating national army.
In that regard I'd see the current situation as a success, not a failure. It also seems like the Taliban have chilled out a bit, since we're not seeing widescale reprisals.
If the Taliban were to attack US forces or otherwise enrage the West right now, they would likely be bombed. If they wait a week, they can do literally whatever they want with no reprisals.
But neither has there been a lot of resistance; most places surrendered without a fight, from what I can tell. That suggests that the Taliban, for good or ill, have more legitimacy in the eyes of Afghanis, than the government we created and supported for the last 20 years. But, Afghanistan has changed, and who really knows what is going to happen. Cell phones are ubiquitous. They hardly existed in 2001. A whole generation of Afghani women are now educated. We'll just have to see. And the Taliban may just have to figure out how to swim with the sharks of that region, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, China.
> That suggests that the Taliban, for good or ill, have more legitimacy in the eyes of Afghanis,
No, I would say that the Afghanis were literally told that they were going to eventually lose the war and that the Taliban would eventually win. The people put in the position to fight the Taliban made the sensible choice to lose peacefully, as opposed to risking their lives for a lost cause.
> the sensible choice to lose peacefully, as opposed to risking their lives for a lost cause.
I wonder how long they cashed their checks, knowing full well they were going to surrender immediately as soon as the US was going to pull out. Or better, despite not ever having the intention of fighting (or even agreeing with the Taliban), claiming persecution to hustle a western visa/passport when they would inevitably lose.
I've read that some families would send one son to fight for the Taliban, and the other to fight for the Afghan army or police as a kind of insurance policy: "The power of kinship led to a common arrangement whereby extended families have protected themselves by sending one son to fight with the government army or police (for pay) and another son to fight with the Taliban. This has been a strategy in many civil wars, for example, among English noble families in the 15th-century Wars of the Roses. It means that at a given point, one of the sons can desert and return home without fearing persecution by the winning side."
"...they've just won." (that is, the Taliban have won)
Consider:
- the Taliban that G.W. Bush knew are gone. Most of them have died,
- OBL and most of his partners are dead,
- almost anyone who helped OBL and is still alive remains a target and lives in fear for their life,
IOW who "won" might be considered to depend on what we mean by the word "Taliban". The Taliban today is not the Taliban of yesteryear. If there is someone who was Taliban during G.W.'s term and is still Taliban today, ask him whether this feels like victory. He might say yes, but then ask him about his old fighting buddies who weren't as lucky as he.
The term "winner" can also mean someone who is still standing when the game ends. In this sense today's "Taliban" has won.
I think we made our point and overstayed our welcome. And now we're going home. We're late but we are leaving Afghanistan.
> IOW who "won" might be considered to depend on what we mean by the word "Taliban".
Well it certainly wouldn’t include UBL or anyone in Al Qaeda, since they are two totally different groups with totally different goals. We could have gone in 20 years ago with the goal of destroying Al Qaeda and their ability to organize terror attacks. We chose to also overthrow the Taliban “government” and install a new government in Afghanistan.
> If there is someone who was Taliban during G.W.'s term and is still Taliban today, ask him whether this feels like victory. He might say yes, but then ask him about his old fighting buddies who weren't as lucky as he.
"The days of the Taliban are over. The future of Afghanistan belongs to the people of Afghanistan. And the future of Afghanistan belongs to freedom." -President Bush 2006
“I am considering two promises. One is the promise of God, the other is that of Bush. The promise of God is that my land is vast. If you start a journey on God's path, you can reside anywhere on this earth and will be protected... The promise of Bush is that there is no place on earth where you can hide that I cannot find you. We will see which one of these two promises is fulfilled…As for the United States' future in Afghanistan, it will be fire and hell and total defeat, God willing, as it was for their predecessors - the Soviets and, before them, the British.”- Mullah Mohammad Omar, 2001
Mullah Mohammad Omar died of natural causes. Jalaluddin Haqqani died of natural causes, and Sirajuddin Haqqani and the other Haqqani senior leaders of today were around in 2001. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, “the Butcher of Kabul”, and a key senior ally to the Taliban pre and post 9/11 is alive and pardoned. Abdul Ghani Baradar, co-founder of the Taliban, is out of prison, and signed the agreement on behalf of the Taliban for the US withdrawal. The Taliban of 2001 and the Taliban of today are the same Taliban, just 20 years apart.
I don’t find your “considerations” at all compelling.
To add to your comment, George Bush's neoconservative faction has been defeated: they are nowhere within the Trump era Republican party. The Democrats have likewise distanced themselves from that era. But the Taliban lives on, having outlasted the shifting political winds in the US.
Allegedly the “government” of Afghanistan (its really just been a sham and a U.S. puppet state for the last 20 years) didn’t want this to happen because they wanted to avoid demoralizing the Afghan army which…subsequently refused to fight anyways. Or at least that’s how I understood some of what Biden said earlier today.
For all we know that was the idea of our own military or intelligence community & now we are conveniently placing the blame for our mistakes on a government that no longer exists
But even more, no matter what group was making the decision, no one could have admitted, no matter how much they expected it, that the whole structure was going to rapidly disintegrate. Because the structure was their product - they produced and managed the thing.
Yeah I think the argument the administration made is a retcon and they made decisions based on bad intelligence that the government would hold up long enough to get everyone and everything out. This idea that their government made a bad suggestion and we listened is silly — they were essentially a puppet state so it’s on us either way.
If the Taliban are smart they won’t do reprisals but instead will offer amnesty in exchange for service.
The dumbest thing we did in Iraq was to do the functional equivalent of the Taliban doing reprisals by disbanding the military, government, and Ba’ath party. It created a mass unemployment problem and swelled the ranks of the opposition with listless now unemployed people.
And not only listless now unemployed people, but listless now unemployed people whose only job skill was being a soldier. I mean what the hell did we think they were going to do.
Wait, are you saying that disbanding a country’s security services, throwing the country into lawless chaos with no local force to enforce laws and keep order, and putting thousands of military trained men out of work, is not a good strategy?
We needed them to operate the structures of the government and military. They commanded loyalty from the people under them in the hierarchy. Most of those people - except for the worst of the leadership - should have been given government jobs, a steady paycheck, and amnesty.
Instead the US had to attempt to rebuild all of those structures of command largely from the ground up anew, which takes years of time and tremendous resources. During those build years, you get constant intense chaos and instability fighting you while you attempt to make progress. It was exceptionally stupid.
Removing the heads of power is one thing.
Disbanding an entire administration is always a bad thing to do. It only creates chaos.
Show me one change of power that disbanded the administration which was successful.
1. Remove the diplomats, embassy staff, translators and other Afghani helpers who were promised safety in return of helping the Americans first.
2. Remove the military equipment - guns, drones, choppers, humvees etc second so that it doesn't fall in the Taliban's hands. At least destroy these equipment if it can't be logistically brought back. Destroy the bases so Taliban can't use them.
3. Lastly pull out the droops as all the important soft targets have already been taken out.
These 3 should have been done in winter before May (original deal was for May) because the Taliban has problems in the winter weather.
Instead of this order, they did the exact opposite. US sat on its ass, didn't remove the soft targets or even take care of those who helped the US. US just pulled out the troops and we ended up with videos of Afghanis running and falling off of aeroplanes and Taliban getting hold of humvees and choppers. And now to take out the soft targets, they have sent 9000 troops back in along with the UK. The Afghanis who had helped Americans for 2 decades got abandoned. And since summer time is when Taliban is at its easiest to move around, the airports have also been taken over.
Fair point but we are talking about thousands of people who were promised safety for their help. Safety doesn't necessarily mean a visa straight to America - it could even mean safety in safe 2nd country or something else. Even diplomats and others were left in embassy for the last moment to be taken out. This abandonment of trust is exactly what ruins the reputation and will then get used as propaganda by the Taliban.
I see this a lot but don't understand why. China has every motivation to prop up the Taliban.
A sister comment already noted the mineral resources, but don't forget the main function of Afghanistan as a nation: production of heroin. Narcopolitics are so fantastically more significant than ever gets any attention from "surface" media, but this is the name of the game. Chinese fentanyl has taken over the global opiate black market, so they have every incentive to support the Taliban who will repress the rival heroin trade over the US-backed government who supported it.
> Ironically, the only power that has demonstrated an ability to cripple the Afghan drug industry is the Taliban.
> In July 2000, when the Taliban controlled most of the country, its reclusive one-eyed leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, declared that opium was un-Islamic and imposed a ban on growing poppies.
> Much to the surprise of the rest of the world, the ban worked. Afraid to cross the Taliban, Afghan farmers immediately ceased planting poppies. The United Nations estimated that poppy cultivation plunged by 90 percent from 2000 to 2001.
I'm skeptical of this common claim. Perhaps that was true when they were an insurgent force needing funds, but I don't think it will continue now that they are in power. Afghan heroin production was at its lowest - essentially none - after it was completely forbidden the last time the Taliban were in power in 2000/2001.
China can have both, I don't see why having both Afghanistan and the Golden Triangle in your pocket is a bad thing if you're interested in opiate production at the global scale.
100% on board. but one scenario: if Taliban supported uprising in Xinjiang. That was one of the things talked about at their recent summit. CCP loves to say don't mess with our internal 'affairs'
> Narcopolitics are so fantastically more significant than ever gets any attention from "surface" media
Indeed! The speculation is that there are people very high up in Chinese system who are cashing up on industrial scale fentanyl production.
Syrian Assad family now makes more money on captagon than they were doing before the war from all their businesses.
Putin Vladimir, the Russian president, made his early fortune on providing legal cover to drug trade in Saint Petersburg, and later delved into the business himself. Russia now runs a state business of drug smuggling through its military missions abroad, and diplomatic missions.
And of course, most famously, Great Britain used to be the biggest narcostate in history. Fortunes of many modern day British elites were built in these times.
Any book recommendations on this topic? Particularly the last point - always crazy to learn how the rich of today made their fortunes from now-illegal means (drug trafficking, slavery, arms dealing, etc.).
China is likely to gain trillions from their belt and road initiative expanding into Afghanistan and from getting involved with the mining of the $3T in mineral resources identified previously in Afghanistan. China has already recognized the new Taliban government and the Taliban previously welcomed a new relationship with China that would protect Chinese interests, as they put it. China literally met with the incoming Taliban leader earlier this year to forge that friendship.
They have also invested heavily in their relationship with Pakistan. Pakistan protected Bin Ladin and are deeply involved in Afghanistan. China can lean on Pakistan to compliment its direct relationship with the Taliban.
Not to mention that the Chinese are significantly more motivated to make Afghanistan work.
As a sign of their influence, the Taliban has said that whatever happens in China’s borders is their business. This was in response to questions about the Uighurs, which, you know, if you’re an Islamic regime you might at least pretend to care about.
It might be better put as "the Han Chinese think everyone else is a barbarian savage, but also, they prefer to leave their vassal states to run their internal affairs themselves. They don't call them barbarian savages on a daily basis."
large scale "boots on the ground" invasions are pretty hard to sell to the american public. they don't generally want to see american soldiers die without a good reason. retaliating against the people who harbored bin laden is already a pretty good reason, and liberating the subjects of an oppressive regime is icing on the cake. of course, it's hard to paint a regime as oppressive without also calling them "backwards". after all, if they were as advanced as us westerners, surely they would have a free democratic society already. /s
Riiiight. With all those ports, infrastructure, and nice easy mountain terrain to navigate.
And let’s say China does somehow befriend the Taliban and build all this infrastructure, and import hundreds of thousands of workers that somehow the Taliban doesn’t decide are yet another empire to kick out. What do you think they do with these resources? They make iPhones. That westerners buy.
And again, even if they do somehow make this happen. Why should anybody care? It’s not like the US is losing these resources or something. And why would China, as large of a country as it is, need these resources? Is it even profitable to extract?
I keep seeing this narrative and it seems to me to be hugely superficial at best. China and Russia would probably prefer the U.S. just keep wasting money and attention in Afghanistan.
Wow jeez when you put it that simply of course they’ll just pay local warlords who totally won’t steal money for fake employees, and they’ll totally have these Afghan people who are hard working and really eager for that 9-5 lifestyle to get out of their own village to “mine” for Chinese engineers and managers.
I hate to be flippant here but this really shows a continued western misunderstanding of how people in places like Afghanistan live.
And even if they did all of that, what good is it exactly? Is China out of resources in China and now will build mountain passes and teach Afghanis how to drive trucks and all of that to mine resources? Sure sounds like nation building to me.
And why would the Taliban agree to this anyway? They could just do the mining themselves.
Eh, China is the new red scare. It is actually twice that since they still have communist in their official name. I jest, but only a little.
I agree with you. It is not a straightforward and foregone conclusion. Taliban has clearly shown that it can play a very long game. That said, so can Chinese.
The modus operandi of China is employment for their people. In almost every country they've lent money for infrastructure, they've brought in their own construction people.
I've seen too much to underestimate the MIC, as Afghanistan's hard fall could easily become "the taliban can't run a nation, we must war", as endless wars resume.
Afghanistan will be busy waring itself. For the past 20 years they probably recruited off the fact that dirty Americans were occupying their glorious country. Now that they're gone, it'll be a straight civil war. They'll be too busy attacking each other. Now that the US is gone, the people who blindly followed will realize that the US wasn't the one in the way of their magical muslim Utopia, and life sucks more than it did before.
As if we can allow that to happen. My guess is some CIA backed Afghani Death Squad can go on murdering sprees causing unrest, so we can I told you so roll eyes 'savages'.
Why would we have to do support bombing runs? What we chose to do could not appear any more embarrassing than letting the ANA get slaughtered/immediately disbanding.
Yes, there is. People want to believe that orderly evacuation is merely a function of planning. It isn't.
* Diplomats -- needed to show support for the government we put in place until it fell. It was always going to fall, so there was always going to be a scramble to get them out. This dynamic has happened before and it will happen again. It's a function of diplomacy, not planning.
* Afghani Allies -- we have to draw the line somewhere at who we evacuate, the line was always going to leave some people out who thought they should be evacuated, and that was always going to be a tragedy. The tragedy is a function of line drawing, not planning.
* Equipment -- we left equipment for the Afghani government. We could have taken it or destroyed it, but that would have been a vote of no confidence in the government we notionally supported, so diplomacy says we leave it and the taliban gets it. Again a function of diplomacy, not planning.
If you try to throw planning and resources at problems that are actually fundamental, what happens is that you announce a troop surge and then 8 years later your presidency is over and you are no closer to leaving Afghanistan.
> we have to draw the line somewhere at who we evacuate, the line was always going to leave some people out who thought they should be evacuated, and that was always going to be a tragedy. The tragedy is a function of line drawing, not planning.
The complain is that current line is roughly "no one". And the people there had not had even time to prepare, organize hiding places or run away.
And take them where? How many Afghans nationals were on the US payroll? Its not our responsibility to take them all into the USA or elsewhere where they can represent a continued burden to those societies, and the ranks of collaborators in Afghanistan were repeatedly infiltrated by Taliban operatives. How many of them will sneak through to the West and cause terror if we let them?
Collaborating with America should not come with a promise of a Green Card. It sets up conflicting motivations - if the 'nation building' fails, the collaborators can bug out to a much better country anyway.
Did you happen to catch his press conference last week?
"The drawdown is proceeding in a secure and orderly way"
"I also assured Ghani that U.S. support for the people of Afghanistan will endure"
"I intend to maintain our diplomatic presence in Afghanistan, and we are coordinating closely with our international partners in order to continue to secure the international airport"
"the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable."
"The Taliban is not the south — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable."
You are being downvoted heavily and I know it’s against HN etiquette to meta comment like this, but it feels worthwhile. I don’t even think you are wrong. However clumsily this is going it’s not even hindsight to say this was a probable and even a more likely outcome. Realistically, there wasn’t much Biden could have done, unless we endorsed another trillion plus dollars to maybe effect some change that would let a more democratic government possibly survive. It was always a tall order. The military industrial complex thrives on this permawar and it’s a net loss because that machine is greased with blood and pain.
We are not talking about the likely outcome or whether US should have stayed longer. Obviously this was the likely outcome and leaving was the right move. But the way they left is a complete disaster.
The proper order to pull out is to:
1. Remove the diplomats, embassy staff, translators and other Afghani helpers who were promised safety in return of helping the Americans first.
2. Remove the military equipment - guns, drones, choppers, humvees etc second so that it doesn't fall in the Taliban's hands. At least destroy these equipment if it can't be logistically brought back. Destroy the bases so Taliban can't use them.
3. Lastly pull out the droops as all the important soft targets have already been taken out.
These 3 should have been done in winter before May (original deal was for May) because the Taliban has problems in the winter weather.
Instead of this order, they did the exact opposite. US sat on its ass, didn't remove the soft targets or even take care of those who helped the US. US just pulled out the troops and we ended up with videos of Afghanis running and falling off of aeroplanes and Taliban getting hold of humvees and choppers. And since summer time is when Taliban is at its easiest to move around, the airports have also been taken over. And now to take out the soft targets, they have sent 9000 troops back in along with the UK. The Afghanis who had helped Americans for 2 decades got abandoned and are now gonna get killed by the Taliban.
absolutely maddening. The US has a network of military bases and armies spread across the world, interjects itself into the affairs of countries worldwide, is by far the greatest warmonger since WW2, are literally on the heels of a colossal failure in Afghanistan that has set the region back decades, yet it's _China_ who are the violent Nazis.
Countries bully other countries when they can. Large powerful countries become large powerful bullies. Those in the service, who tend to be working class or poor, and those in other countries pay the ultimate price. The powerful grow more powerful. The empire grows. Modern imperialism.
The public is often easily manipulated. Like you said, the U.S. has been at war pretty much constantly for 75+ years, and empire building for at least 50 years before that, without ever really being in danger, exaggerating and dehumanizing every enemy along the way. To question this is un-American.
Many people don't seem to be able to imagine other perspectives. I guess that's true of both the school yard bully and the nation state bully. When you can bully someone there's no reason to care what they think.
Offhand, the entire broadband portion of the budget for the next 5-20 years was 65B.
Maybe healthcare lacks effective resource management. I sure as heck know I always hear quoted prices in other first world countries that are far less, often 1/10th of what we pay in the US.
Here in Ontario with our single payer system the health care budget sits at around $60B a year, for a population of ~14M, or per-capita about $4.6k (CAD) per person.
If you extrapolate that out to a nation of 328 million, that's about $1.5T CAD / $1.1T USD a year.
For a larger population comparison, let's use the UK. NHS budget for 2018 was 114B UKP, or ~$158B USD. For a population of about 66 million people, that works out to about $2.4k USD per person per year and about a $775B USD/year budget.
$3.8T a year on health should pay for universal on demand health care for 100% of the population. Crazy that it's not.
For context 1: "U.S. health care spending grew 4.6 percent in 2019, reaching $3.8 trillion or $11,582 per person. As a share of the nation's Gross Domestic Product, health spending accounted for 17.7 percent."
According to the US Gov "Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services", in 2019 (pre pandemic) the US was already spending 3.8 trillion (~3.5x the estimate) or $11,582 per person and not fully serving everyone in the process. Maybe the medical bickering/billing departments raise the price 2-3 times.
“Medicare for all”, the single payer universal healthcare system in the US, was projected to cost between $16-34T [1] over a decade. I know there are some big questions around the actual cost of US aggression / state terrorism since 9/11 (ie 6.4T vs 2T as per other entries in this thread). A rough 80/20 analysis suggests:
* We could have funded free healthcare to roughly one quarter of the US population for 10 years (see [1])
* We could have funded free medication for all US citizens for 20 years (assuming US spends an average $1100/yr per patient, approx double of other countries [2], viz a biz the estimated spend of $1K USD / yr per US citizen spent over 20 years on aggression since 9-11 mentioned above)
* …
I quite like the following quote by Noam Chomsky on US international terror in Afghanistan (and Nicaragua, Iraq, Sudan and many other places):
“ The U.S. is officially committed to what is called “low–intensity warfare.” That’s the official doctrine. If you read the definition of low–intensity conflict in army manuals and compare it with official definitions of “terrorism” in army manuals, or the U.S. Code, you find they’re almost the same. Terrorism is the use of coercive means aimed at civilian populations in an effort to achieve political, religious, or other aims. That’s what the World Trade Center bombing was, a particularly horrifying terrorist crime. And that’s official doctrine. I mentioned a couple of examples. We could go on and on. It’s simply part of state action, not just the U.S. of course.” [3]
It's never been a matter of money. We've seen the government can pass multi trillion dollar bills on demand and increase the budget at will. That's what is lacking, the political power/will to pass such legislation. It's unfortunate but it has nothing to do with this war or its cost.
It's sometimes handy to define tradeoffs as a "question of money" and understand through this that things have costs. Fighter jets don't manufacture themselves. The metal to make guns is smelted in blast furnaces built and maintained by men and materials that someone paid for, using fuel someone paid for, and those people who were paid didn't do it for the decimal(2) value of the dollars involved, they did it for the real value. The soldiers who serve expect to be discharged with the cash which will buy them a home and a car and the other benefits they've been promised. These all require resources; someone else is deprived of the resources they would otherwise have, in order to make these things happen.
It's great if you can measure this process in money. Of course you can print as much as you want, and of course that doesn't mean any more resources exist, and then you need the economists to try their best to make adjustments to the numbers as you go along.
I feel like most of the resources needed for healthcare already exist as part of the current system. It's simply a matter of policy and how it's paid for. But I am not an expert and could be missing a key point.
Well, health care services are an ongoing expense. You pay doctors twice a month. Doctors expect to buy new things sometimes, not just "resources that already exist".
And it's fine to say "society can afford <x>" in isolation — we obviously have spent the money on the war, we obviously have spent money on health care. It's a question of trade-offs and whether spending money on the war is worth it. And that's really an awful lot of money to have spent on a war.
The risk we see today with money is that we're trying to make a lot more of it and we might find that it doesn't mean the resources we expected. Weekly earnings in the US are up $16/wk since January — but adjusting for inflation they're down $9/week.
It's not "society can afford <x>". It's society has already afforded <x> for the entire duration of this 20 year war. That is not speculation. It also had nothing to do with the money printing during covid or the recent signs of inflation.
> It's never been a matter of money. We've seen the government can pass multi trillion dollar bills on demand and increase the budget at will.
Not without consequences. Contrary to the headlines, we can’t simply print as much money into existence as we want.
For example, the actual cost of the war was closer to $2T. The $6.4T number quoted in this headline is the theoretical sum total including interest payments on the debt well into the future.
Simply passing bills to spend money that we don’t have may get things done, but our children have to pay for it eventually.
Even cheap debt must still be serviced. A significant portion of your tax bill every year goes to servicing interest on national debt.
So no, it’s not simply a matter of political will to spend all the money we want. There are limits.
> Simply passing bills to spend money that we don’t have may get things done, but our children have to pay for it eventually.
Government debt is not that simple at all. A governments debts and budgets are no the same as a household.
This also completely ignores economic growth and how types of inflation (cost-push vs demand-pull) affect if inflation or debt is “good” or “bad”.
> So no, it’s not simply a matter of political will to spend all the money we want. There are limits.
Please explain the limits if it’s a dollar amount. Most economists agree that we actually do not know what the “limit” is and mostly we noticed very little if anything troubling caused directly by the stimulus packages. They overwhelmingly helped keep economic growth stable.
Yeah I agree, you can't print money without consequences. But my point was when the political will exists things seem to get done regardless of whether we can afford them or not.
>Simply passing bills to spend money that we don’t have may get things done, but our children have to pay for it eventually.
I always see this argument, but never a deeper reason why. As far as I know, the projections for every developed economy looks like this, is every country going to go bankrupt eventually? If the economy is growing, we can in fact print money with little to no consequence of inflation. The US can "borrow" money incredibly cheaply. Government spending stimulates the economy, we can spend and do much more than we currently are, if we merely choose to build instead of destroy.
Why not round everyone’s bank account up to the nearest $1,000,000,000,000,000? Wouldn’t such unprecedented “stimulus” create unprecedented growth and end poverty forever? Would our newfound quadrillions end scarcity of resources? If not, why not?
While it is true that these things aren't just a matter of money, it is difficult to argue that Afghanistan was a better place to put the funding.
This is ultimately the biggest domestic consequence of the war for the US - if someone can have their way burning trillions of dollars (of borrowed funds, no less) wrecking Afghanistan, what is the justification for not doing the same thing for something that makes someone - anyone - feel good about life?
Perhaps they should've spent this much on medical research instead. For the same money perhaps we could save a few million people dying of various diseases or cancer. It would take a whole lot of terrorist events to counter the benefits of significant R&D funding for medicine (or maybe a lot of other things).
$6.4T into renewables and storage over the past 20 years would have decarbonized the US grid several time over, accelerated the tech curve drastically, nearly completely transitioned us to EVs, and we'd probably have decarbonized a good chunk of industry that is hard to decarbonize now.
We'd have cheaper energy than we do today, and cheaper energy forever. We could have been looking at current levels of climate change, instead of the far far bigger changes that we are now going to experience.
And why did we spend so much on these countries? It all comes back to oil and the fear of losing access to oil to power the economy.
We really should never forgive those who work for the fossil fuel industry for putting us on this timeline with their active deceipt, lies, and massive propaganda campaign. There should be no forgiveness for what they have cost us.
Absolutely, it's a good reminder that there is a lot of behind the scenes bullshit at play in this world.
The world was screwed on this deal and while it's an absolutely humanitarian rights disaster and tragedy what's happening in Afghanistan, maybe the current Administration has worked out that it would be better to spend the money elsewhere, hopefully on tackling climate change.
What evidence do you have that Afghanistan was due to oil, and not due to the most direct motivations, like Taliban sheltering Al Qaeda (as they still do)? This seems like a conspiracy theory.
On the public face, the politicians talked about t-----ism and A- Q----. Behind the scenes, they're all doing things like this and getting filthy rich:
What am I supposed to be taking away from that Wikipedia link? The words “Afghanistan” and “war” don’t appear in the article anywhere. It mentions some activity in Israel and that’s it. It feels to me like you’re mentioning a random energy company as a bogeyman, but it doesn’t actually involve any particular malicious activity.
I think the parent is talking about the fact Dick Cheney is on the advisory board among other former US government officials as seen on the linked page.
If you want to go there look at the acres of cultivation of opium under Taliban and then under US occupation. Ask where that exponential increase in production was spent.
I don't think opium has much to do with the initial invasion of Afghanistan, but I think that there's a pretty good argument that it has had a big effect on what has played out during the occupation. So I'm not fully sure of the relevance of the comment either.
The purpose of invading Afghanistan was to enact revenge for the September 11th attacks. The reasons for the attacks that directly relate to the US are:
* US support for Israel (specifically Lebanon) -- support that the US gives as a strategic ally in the oil-rich Middle East. Without oil in the region, we would not be expending as much effort on this support.
* US troops in Saudi Arabia -- troops are there because of the oil
* Sanctions against Iraq -- placed there again because of oil and the annexation of Kuwait over oil.
Come on - it was not to enact "revenge". That is hyperbolic editorialization. It was because the Taliban had consistently been harboring Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, had close ties with Al Qaeda (who attacked the US), and they would have granted those same terrorists safe harbor again if left alone. The Taliban continues to maintain close ties with Al Qaeda today (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/taliban-k...), which is why handing them back Afghanistan is an incredible failure of leadership for the US. The rest of your alleged oil-motivated acts all have other motives as well, so I remain unconvinced by your overall argument.
Bush the Lesser specifically emphasized revenge in his famous petulant rant from "ground zero". Did you somehow miss this great modern American oration to which we are subjected on every 9/11 anniversary?
We were literally a couple hundred votes from Gore 20 years ago. How different our world would have been today with a climate focused presidency two decades ago. 9/11 would have probably came and went without fanfare like most terrorist attacks, much less spurred invasion of two countries.
Could we? I am genuinely curious: has anybody tried to quantify the ROI in lives saved or life years saved (or something) from spending on medical research? Is that a stupid question because medical advances come in fits and starts and don't have steady progress?
Over simplifications fail to account for scale. It’s easy to point fingers at some fact taken from past events and it’s even easier to compare that number to some hypothetical fantasy.
First, is there any equivalent political will for any of the examples you, or anybody else, mentioned?
Second, it’s hard to imagine mobilizing as many doctors into temporary housing as you can soldiers, continuously for almost 2 decades. From a practical perspective this seems unlikely no matter how well intended.
Third, I haven’t seen any consideration of logistical factors for any counter examples in any of the comments here. This is the one thing that separates fantasy from reality, even more than money or willpower.
I’ve never heard of “posh houses in the beltway” that are owned by people involved in defense, yet you and another poster both brought this up. Is this actually a thing?
Yes, my cousin lives in one. He used to be a soldier that went on several tours in the region, then transitioned to a private job in the industry that made him wealthy.
In another vein, it would have been cheaper to build a house, give a Ford Mustang, a tractor, and home appliances to every household in Afghanistan than to pay for the war there.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that wages are quite inflated in the USA and $1000/year is not a livable income (i.e. sufficient for cheap housing, cheap food, water, electricity, basic appliances like a fridge and washing machine, heating, and pretty much nothing else) even in Europe where I'm from. Or am I missing the point of a UBI?
Discretionary income for a lot of families is — functionally — zero. The result is that any sort of financial issue becomes a devastating (possibly lifelong) burden. Most of these issues are single-occurrence and probably fall in the 200–500$ range. A 1000$ a year UBI would be life-changing for them.
And by "them" I mean, like, 50% of the country.
I'm in Texas, and the maximum amount of cash assistance possible — married parents, multiple kids, demonstrated need, is something like 83$ a month; I think, once?
Assuming prices of necessities don't rise to capture that UBI. Which is a very real concern; when all your potential customers have an extra $1000/year, you raise your prices by $1000/year and suddenly you have $(1000 * # customers) extra per year and they're back where they started.
To really fix poverty, you need to address shortages, particularly ones in basic necessities. If there's a housing unit available for everyone, landlords will have no leverage to raise rents. If there's a preschool for every kid, the cost of childcare won't go up. If there's a doctor (really a health insurer - the issue is monopolization of the customer channel) for everyone and you can switch easily, the cost of healthcare won't go up.
If you give money to people and don't fix the underlying shortages, the price just adjusts to capture that money.
Yes, it's assuming competition doesn't exist, or that competitors are few enough in number that they can collude to not undercut each other.
An increasing number of necessities are reaching that state, though. The U.S. has about 5 big health insurers, and in a given region you might only have a realistic choice between 2-3 of them. Many regions have only one broadband Internet provider, and one electric/gas/water/sewer/garbage utility. Childcare and housing are competitive, but with an undersupply that's gotten significantly worse during the pandemic. My county closed 75% of its registered daycares during lockdown; fortunately births plummeted and some are coming back, but there've already been pretty significant price increases. A lot of small-time landlords were forced out of the market by eviction moratoriums, so expect even more corporate-owned apartment complexes.
Fix the competition issue and I'm all for UBI, but if you just institute UBI without fixing zoning and antitrust and regulatory capture it's just going to enrich a small class of people.
Per the US BLS and Federal Reserve, the median discretionary household income is $1000 per month. That is after all ordinary expenses, not just necessary ones.
There is a significant percentage of the US that has no discretionary income in any meaningful sense, and that is something we should be concerned about, but it is nowhere near 50%.
$1000 per person is a big deal, and would cover rent or mortgage costs for most of the people I know. Though honestly, a lot my family members would squander it on things like new cars or electronics instead of paying off debt or investing for retirement..
GP was talking per year, not per month. This would be $83/month. Of course $1000 per month after taxes is a livable income (in Europe at least, I don't know what prices are like in the USA provided you're willing to move to a non-peak-price area) and does not merely cover housing, even if it's borderline poverty in richer countries with higher prices.
Basic living expenses consume the entire income of ~15% of US households, per government and Federal Reserve studies. That's around 20 million households. For these people, an extra $1000 is a lot of money.
$1000/year may not be UBI in a traditional sense but it also isn't nothing. In many parts of the US that is more than the average monthly rent for an apartment.
> more than the average monthly rent for an apartment
Sure so you get, in a good case, 3 months' rent out of it and then you still need to eat. Yes it helps, yes it would be great in addition to other social benefits, but a UBI it is not unless I have a wrong impression of what a UBI is supposed to be.
> According to the study, for every $1 billion spent by the Pentagon to buy goods and services, 28,000 jobs are created in the private sector. The same investment would create 32,000 jobs if spent on public transportation, 57,000 if used for personal consumption and 71,000 jobs if spent on education, the report contended.
UBI would have generated those same jobs with new consumption! :) Just you know, jobs in service of productive things, and the Halliburtons might actually have to, gasp, compete.
> $1000 a year would have made a nice universal basic income for the last 20 years.
I think you mean per month, not year.
The idea of UBI is to give everyone a subsistence income so they can devote themselves to skill development and career advancement, even/especially while caring for kids. $1000/year doesn't remotely accomplish that.
No, $20,000 per tax payer is $1,000 per year over the last 20 years we've been in Afghanistan.
Which comes out to a whopping $83.33 per month. I think this just illustrates how expensive these UBI plans really are... particularly the ones that flaunt several thousand dollar payments to every tax payer per month.
> I think this just illustrates how expensive these UBI plans really are...
One thing to keep in mind is that this is half of the military budget, which is less than half of discretionary spending, which is much less than half of total federal spending.
The other thing to keep in mind is that most of the UBI money would be immediately recaptured in income tax. Making it Universal keeps the logistics simpler, but a wealthy person should end up with little to negative extra money from a reasonable UBI implementation.
> particularly the ones that flaunt several thousand dollar payments to every tax payer per month.
Who's suggesting that much? And are they suggesting it for normal circumstances where people are able to work?
> And are they suggesting it for normal circumstances where people are able to work?
What would the U in UBI possibly mean if it’s conditioned on someone’s judgment of the recipient being able to work? (If they do earn income, you can tax some of it back, but if they simply choose not to and that means you don’t pay them, it’s by no means “Universal”.)
> One thing to keep in mind is that this is half of the military budget
Prior to "COVID Spending", the total US budget was $4.5 Trillion in 2019, of which 3.4 Trillion was from revenue, and nearly $1 Trillion was deficit spending[1]. In 2019, the total Military budget was a little above $700 Billion[2]. (these numbers also highlight the absurd levels of spending being contemplated in congress right now, 1.2 Trillion and another 3.4 Trillion - these are huge numbers).
Sure, there's waste in the military budget, but majority of it is indeed well spent (we ask a lot of our armed forces these days, and that requires a lot of money, ie. you could not say, cut the military budget in half without severe consequences).
For a UBI to make a significant impact on someone's life, it will need to be substantial (at least several hundred dollars per month). Cost of living, and therefore purchase power of that UBI varies wildly across the country, but even if we just keep things simple and pay every taxpayer (~144 million people[3]) $500 monthly, that total weighs in at 72 Billion Dollars every month, or $864 Billion annually. (again, just for tax payers)
Some of that money will be recaptured in taxes (income taxes, which is absurd on a UBI, and sales taxes), but majority of it will end up directly in the economy. While good for the economy, that level of spending is just untenable long term for the federal government... and that's only for $500, an in-significant amount of money in major metropolitan areas such as San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, etc. Which is why many people are arguing for $2,000 monthly for all tax payers... and as you can see, the numbers just plain do not work.
> ie. you could not say, cut the military budget in half without severe consequences
You could easily cut a third and match 2000's budget, adjusted for inflation. I bet half isn't even hard if we stop funding things like multi-role fighters.
> and that's only for $500, an in-significant amount of money in major metropolitan areas
UBI doesn't have to pay enough to live anywhere without a job on top.
And again, who is arguing for $2k monthly? That's enough for two people to almost hit median household income. Definitely much more than necessary.
> $864 Billion annually.
Why is that not sustainable? If military cuts take that down to $500B, that's only an 11% budget increase.
If the top 10% of earners paid a bit over a third more income tax, that would be enough to cover it. They're not even taxed that much when you consider capital gains.
You could make it happen without military cuts too, if you wanted.
And make no mistake, $500 a month with no strings attached is enough to do amazing things.
The money was mostly spent domestically, the US military wants domestic suppliers to minimize risks in an actual war. This means they is domestic manufacturing for everything from missiles to socks.
Given the current state of Afghanistan, the return on investment is definitely not worth it. Our grandchildren will be paying for this debt.
This is $2T that could have went towards this country’s dismal healthcare system, funding social security, public education, and miscellaneous social programs.
Instead it has went directly to the DoD companies and private military contracting companies. $2T was literally stolen from the American people. This doesn’t even include the costs to support the few Afghan immigrants that we were able to extract and the healthcare towards the veterans that gave their limbs and life to the service.
As an American, I feel sick just thinking about it.
A debt denominated in a fiat currency AND we might have spent 2T on the wards, but the full accounting has to include the full cost benefits of those expenditures, some of which could have been positive (in terms of financials).
This title is completely wrong. The article estimates the US has accumulated around $2 trillion in war debt as of 2020. It goes on to estimate interest payments will equal $2 trillion by 2030 and $6.4 trillion by 2050.
It's really not. If you buy a house with a mortgage, and later sell the house before the note is due, you will not owe the full amount of the accrued interest. Unfortunately the resale value of a secondhand war is very low.
You might in a state of nature, but the US has laws against prepayment penalties for mortgages. (Well, against the mortgage originator charging prepayment penalties.) You don't owe interest until it accrues.
Right, you 'owe the full amount of accrued interest'... Which is not as much as the amount that would've accrued if held to term. I think this is rather beside the point anyway!
I guess that's true, the war was owned by Russia before the US purchased it at a very steep markup, while the Russians probably got a good deal on it from the Brits after it sat on a shelf for a century or so.
I'm hopeful, though not at all optimistic in the short term, that it will now be EOL'ed. Unfortunately, as a product class these things tend to be very durable, and families can pass them down for generations as a curiosity until someone decides to put it back in the market. Or some new startup sees a chance to innovate while moving fast and breaking things.
I don't think there's any clause in US bonds that lets the US pay back the debt to avoid future coupon payments, like there is with a mortgage.
However, since there's an open market for t bills, the treasury could buy back a certain number of bonds that people are willing to sell.
However it's not quite the same. The only reason that problem don't calculate the cost of the mortgage over time is that they are more concerned with asset values, not because it's better accounting.
> you will not owe the full amount of the accrued interest
Yes, you will. "accrued interest" is "unpaid interest as of the time of ___"; at the moment you sell the house you will have paid all of the interest up to that moment.
There's no early-payment penalty on mortgages, as of the last many decades; maybe that's what you mean?
Most people wouldn't say that. If I buy a $500K home with a $400K mortgage and the mortgage ends up costing me $600K over the next 30 years, I don't know anyone who'd claim that I spent $700K. Most would say I spent $500K; a few would say I spent $100K and borrowed $400K.
Among various things that could happen: I might pay off the $400K next year and pay a grand total of $411K in interest. I might sell the house for $700K and book a $200K profit on my $100K cash. I might lose my job, get foreclosed upon, and then be out $100K plus whatever payments I've already made. I might have had $500K in cash to begin with, but wanted to invest $400K in Ethereum, see it moon for a 20x return, and make a cool $8M profit on top of the house. Or I could carry the mortgage to term, and then I really will have spent $700K.
The US prints two kinds of money: 1) dollars, which are subject to inflation and decrease in value over time, and 2) bonds, which accumulate in dollar value over time, usually in front of inflation.
So because we spent bonds instead of spending dollars, we can not take their dollar value as the cost, because that's most definitely not what we printed for these.
Not exactly. The Federal Reserve and the US Treasury do a dance where the Treasury tells the Fed how many dollars it needs and then creates notes, bills, and bonds in the desired amount. It then performs a simple asset swap with the Fed to receive reserves in exchange for those bonds. This is slightly obfuscated by the primary dealer auction process, but in extremis the Fed can and will just buy the bonds itself. This never happens because for some reason the private banks that are primary dealers don't choose to give away free seigniorage money.
You say "not exactly," but I don't see anything that conflicts with what's described in my comment.
I do appreciate the details though, as it does help people understand the way that we have set up these institutions, which in turn points to what we might want to change to make the process better.
Edit: Y’all, every other OECD country doesn’t have the healthcare challenges the US has, and they also don’t light trillions of $fiat on fire waging useless wars. You should care how tax dollars are spent.
The average 20-year cost of Afghanistan was $100 billion per year. At that cost you’re either getting really crappy healthcare or the program is means tested (which means it’s not so universal.)
> every other OECD country doesn’t have the healthcare challenges the US has
Right, but they also don’t seem to have the same cost disease issues, or at least not to the same extent.
The fact that Germany or Japan spends $x per capita on something doesn’t necessarily imply that it would be possible for the US to achieve the same result for the same price.
The US has the most expensive healthcare because of the healthcare system, not because of the diseases.
Canadians get the same medications as Americans, and for the most part the same treatment. Everything is more expensive the US because the healthcare system takes advantage of the sick, before treating them.
Playing devil's advocate because I don't think cost is the main reason we don't have universal healthcare in the US:
Bernie Sanders (who is probably the most pro-universal healthcare politician in the US so his numbers might be on the low side) estimated that Medicare For All would cost $3-4 trillion per year.
The war in Afghanistan was about 10x cheaper per year.
Healthcare spending is currently $3-4 trillion a year. The important number is the difference between M4A and the status quo, not total spending. The sleazy hacks quoting him intentionally equivocated about this.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/05/global-healt... (“The United States has the worst health-care system overall among 11 high-income countries, even though it spends the highest proportion of its gross domestic product on health care, according to research by the Commonwealth Fund.”)
In France where I was raised and China where I raise my kids, which both have affordable good quality health care, we tend to say it's due to economy of scale.
We negociate national prices with indian labs, we manufacture at planned cost locally, we use the school system in synergy with healthcare to do preventive vaccination, dental, eye and ear care, we work hard on conflict of interest between doctors and drug sellers (a doctor always find you sicker if he makes a profit on the medicine he prescribes), we encourage to fix very early that way rather than when it s far too late. In France, competition between providers is hunted even more than communists would, with geographical quotas and strict university numerus closus to ensure price stability and fair enough spread of providers nationally (but still have challenges in the countryside).
Both systems are far from perfect and bleed tax money, but... so much more efficient than the weird US system that requires loan from poor people to fix a broken leg (I probably exaggerate).
Interesting perspective, and thanks! Per your last point, it's basically correct, but more like an involuntary loan.
Upfront payment is never required, but a debt always results. If you were to arrive unconscious at a hospital after an accident, they would save your life and you could wake up to a bill that was more than your net worth. No person with any sense and assets to protect would go without health insurance. The poor just avoid the debt collectors as long as they can.
Not with the current system. $6.4T over 20 years = $340B/yr. The US spends 2x that per year just for medicare, which only covers approximately 20% of the population.
That's not M4A then, that's public option. M4A bans all other insurance (apparently? I don't know if there are multiple "versions") for collective bargaining reasons.
Sure, but would you consider 30% coverage from the government to be "universal healthcare"? Because that's what you get for $900B/yr.
And we already have a public/private mix of healthcare with medicare/medicaid/ACA/workplace offered healthcare. That system, today, covers 90% of the population.
Here in Argentina you have a public system that everyone can use. Now, if you want, you can pay for private healthcare and use that if you think it's better, but the public system is still available even then, and there are no limits to what it covers.
The public system doesn't care if you can pay it or not, or even if you're a national or a foreigner. Just walk in, show some ID, and you can use it.
Things like 9/11 were easily played over and over again, and generated support for the afghan war in the first place.
In NZ when the terrorists broadcasted the Christchurch mosque shootings on facebook, NZ took action swiftly -- banning most semiautomatic weapons.
When BLM protests showed cops shooting, tasing, and running over people with patrol cars -- those images were more compelling than any story that could have been written.
OTOH, Last year one nursing home in NJ had stacked up 17 bodies during a in a shed during a covid outbreak -- yet none of the gruesomeness was aired. I have not recalled seeing any videos of people falling dead due to a mass shooting in the US, other than maybe blurred out video.
I'm not saying we should or should not see more graphic images, but it seems like self-censorship of the aftermath of violence or tragedy has unintended consequences.
It certainly does. Vietnam was the first war with embedded journalists showing the american people live footage of real combat. It was often gruesome. It lead to people protesting in the streets, burning draft cards, fleeing to Canada, and most of all made the Vietnam war into a political quagmire and put pressure on ending it. That sort of coverage of a conflict has noticeably never happened again. Anytime you see footage these days on the news it feels like B rolls or some stock footage of a couple solders walking around the desert or a truck driving along or some far off building exploding. The media hides the reality of war from the American public after seeing how the public has reacted in the past to this content. It's disingenuous, and you end up with kids joining thinking it will be like Call of Duty and coming back home with PTSD and no easy future due to their broken condition.
I completely agree with that. because of HIPAA there hasn't been nearly enough media. There is more now I think a concerted effort to get testimonials of people in hospital their family dead saying they wish they got the vaccine. But it's too late.
I think if we had Vietnam style video of death from the start we wouldn't have as large of a % living in alternate realities.
It’s funny, over 60k Afghan police/military died, and our plan was to arm 300k of them and hope they like perpetual war against the Taliban. Yeah, I think they did a hard pass on that one and just wanted it all to stop.
I think what we have here is a failure to understand population motivations. I do not want to overstate this, but it seems to be lost over the fact that it was two decades now. US was the invader here. You can train all you want, but those people are not idiots or easily swayed. They survived multiple regime changes, coups, upheavals and this is just another one of them.
As insane as it sounds, in that frame of mind, Taliban is a lesser evil here compared to a foreign adversary that walks around like they own the place.
Once you understand this, and by this I mean "the population does not want you here and sees you as the invader", none of this is a surprise.
Next up, just wait till you hear what population of Iraq wants ( but we all know US simply cannot leave Iraq -- ever ).
They did a hard pass on that one when their commanders were embezzling their resources and they were expected to defend a nation with shoestrings and no backup or any more resources on the way. It was a suicide mission to not give up, plain and simple.
Regarding perpetual war, I'm not sure that was inevitable. Without massive corruption, incompetent leadership, and Russia providing weapons to the Taliban things might not have been so bleak.
Ah yes, but Haliburton couldn't spend money on a 'war against mask wearing', so they were the true victims here.
/s, of course.
It's been obvious early on that the whole motive for our ratfucking of the middle east had nothing to do with the "WMDs" nor 9/11... lest we would have not gone under false pretenses, actually had gone after the country who financed the ones who flew the planes, nor remained as long as we had after Bin Laden was found. Instead we spent more money than had ever been spent before on one thing in our country's history... but on another country.
That money went somewhere.
Defense contractors.
Meanwhile, infrastructure all across the US is derelict.
Case in point, 47,000+ bridges in the US are now considered 'structurally deficient.'
> "We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy," bin Laden said in a taped statement. Only the smallest sign of al-Qaida would "make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations."
The article this quote was pulled from is from 2011. So, for at LEAST TEN YEARS, we knew the explicit goal was to prolong an unwinnable war in order to bleed the country dry.
Why couldn't these defense contractors be paid to bring things up to snuff here instead of pissing it away on a 'war against terror' that we had no hope to win?
> years of expected life lost is the more important metric imo.
If you start doing this, you start valuing peoples lives differently, which is a horrible thing. Going just from this, you could say that an Afghan citizen is worth about 82% of an US citizen (64 vs 78 years life expectancy) or that burning down a whole palliative care unit is less bad than shooting a 20 year old (or 16 year old Afghan).
I can see where you are coming from, but this is really not a good road to go down.
I hate to break it to you, but “quality-adjusted life years” [1] is already a standard metric for evaluating medical interventions.
While the whole “death panel” thing is exaggerated, it is necessary that insurers (incl. single payer governments) have quantitative ways to evaluate different treatments. They won’t throw infinite $$ at every treat that is expected to add a tiny amount to your life.
I dont dispute your numbers at all...I just don't understand your point. They're just such vastly different situations managed by different sets of people for different reasons. The "war on terror" was excessive and over budget, but not 100% uncalled for. There WERE follow up terror attacks that happened(london bombing 2005, madrid bombing 2004, paris bataclan attack, etc) and there were some that were foiled, even if just by luck like the shoe bomber. I agree that Afghanistan went too far, too long and too expensive but what does that have to do with covid?
What does that have to do with covid though? Im not here to justify the war on terror Im just wondering what the basis of comparison is. Covid has affected nearly 100% of the population in almost every country either directly and indirectly, either by getting sick or not being allowed to work or shop or show their face in public. The reach of covid response has gone far beyond having to take our shoes off in airports. Is OP upset that the nobody has calculated whether it has cost trillions yet?
> The argument is that the effort we spent in the war on terror, per motivating death, was massively greater than the effort we've spent fighting covid.
We can't even get people to take the vaccine willingly after we made every vaccine free.
When will we learn that money doesn't solve everything? It is only a sufficiently motivating factor to greedy people. Religiously motivated people are explicitly raised to be weary of money (you cannot serve two masters: choose God or mammon, where mammon is roughly translated as money, greed, or material wealth)
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We can't spend money to grow the Afghan army, because they weren't motivated by money. We can't spend more money to fight COVID19, because the anti-vaxxers aren't motivated by money either. Our vaccines are sitting in storage and expiring.
We designed and built the vaccines in record time. I'm not entirely sure how else we could add money to this system and expect any benefits with regards to COVID19. Student nurses are regularly helping out in hospitals before they're even graduated, we're pulling retired doctors/nurses out of retirement to help fill hospitals. Etc. etc.
Money isn't the solution anymore. We've spent as much as we're able. The remaining problems that face us are entirely independent of money.
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The only consistent thing between Afghanistan and COVID19 is that Americans have overspent money hoping that overspending will fix everything.
There have been numerous studies demonstrating our inability to rationally assess terrorism relative to other threats. Acknowledging our psychological shortcomings is the first step toward self-improvement.
It wasn't the first terrorist attack on home turf and it wasn't the last. The outrage was drummed up by the media to build support for the war. Remember the Dixie Chicks getting ostracised for speaking out against the war? They were one of the most popular artists at the time and their careers were over after that in an instant due to how gung ho everyone was. I think part of the initial support was that people were envisioning another Desert Storm, less than 50 days and done thanks to superior American training technology firepower etc. When it came to not be the case that support seemed to evaporate fast and many awoke from the collective stupor enraged at the outsized response with ill defined goals, some of the more clearly defined ones being entirely false (Saddam's WMDs).
Or people of all colors and nations (some of them surely white guys) angry that the "white guy choice" did win the election. DC was quite boarded up [0] and it was not in fear of a Trump loose.
Please don't be a racist and call the factions by what they are, not by their gender or skin color.
Create a system where ignorance of the laws of large numbers means that you go bankrupt and have to work for someone else, thus putting the number-crunchers in charge.
This is basically modern capitalism. It works, as a way of managing large numbers. Most people hate it, though, because it has a tendency of reducing humans to numbers.
Loss of 621k lives on one side or two or more doesn't really amount to War. Ike never lost 1 life in the mil. for the term of his admin. Eighth grader mil. brass knuckleheads promoted too far these days are puppets on the mil. industrial complexes's strings. Do the share buy backs the mil. firms do go ultimately to sovereign wealth hedgefunds such as the Communist Party behind smoke and mirrors?
I cannot understand just why it is that the average person seems to be so incapable at understanding statistics and large numbers. It's mind boggling. Ever since my freshman engineering stats class, it's like everywhere I look at where there's stupid bullshit happening, a large reason as to why
the stupid bullshit is happening is because people have zero understanding of statistics and large numbers.
It's always been incredibly intuitive to me as somebody schooled in the US public education system, and I wasn't even good at math until college because the school teachers were just terrible at teaching actual concepts. And like, I know that I am very much nothing special. But to too damn many people, it just seems to completely blow over their heads...
No, not all statistics are intuitive, definitely a reason why there's statistics, and then engineering statistics in most colleges.
However, the simpler parts/beginning of either course... really do seem like they should be intuitive to anybody who made it with a D through middle school math. Basic applied ratios and such. Like the fact near 5 billion covid vaccines have been administered worldwide now and there are still people vehemently arguing about the horrible things that are going to happen to them specifically if they get a vaccine...
> there are still people vehemently arguing about the horrible things that are going to happen to them specifically if they get a vaccine...
Can you make a steel man argument on their behalf?
Or is that so preposterous that it beneath you and wouldn’t waste your time on that?
Because I’m starting to wonder if people with strong opinions like yours seems to be really are any different than the true believers on “the other side”. Or if you just feel confident in your echo chamber as “unquestionably right” because you (or I) aren’t questioned.
I find the more I know about a topic the less I make absolutes like the one I quoted. You can’t make legitimate arguments against the covid vaccines? Shouldn’t we all be able to?
I don’t think we evolved to think about statistics in an intuitive manner. I think we tended to think more causally and with computationally less intensive heuristics. Asking most people about the birthday problem veridical paradox is a quick way to illustrate this.
I would also argue it’s why humans are bad at estimating risks regarding low probability events. See: spacecraft mishaps that seem obvious in hindsight
Average Americans don't understand American politics.
To me, the transition from Bush to Obama was paradoxal.
One thing, Obama marketed himself as a change man, as well pretty much everybody. It's very generic.
On the other side, his true colours weren't even hidden, his electoral programme told very candidly about his national security views, views on civil rights, and etc for which he got flak later.
If I haven't seen the name, and explicitly liberal branding on these electoral materials, I could've said it's coming from a conservative, doctrinaire statist very much like Bush.
The point is people are angry at Obama exactly on the points they elected him for.
This will be an issue as long as the US has first-past-the-post elections.
In the current system, many people simply vote for the least bad option, because voting for a party that actually represented their beliefs would make their vote irrelevant (or worse, give an advantage to the party they really dislike).
My impression was that Obama wanted to be more progressive-- domestically if not internationally. But he got derailed spending 2 years of a supermajority on a single issue (healthcare) partly because more centrist democrats objected to the more progressive ideas, and partly due to special interests. After the midterms he had little chance at passing more progressive policies, leaving a fairly centrist foreign policy agenda.
First, the ACA passed in March 2010, so not really 2 years on health care. The tweaks folded into reconciliation were not a major distraction.
Second, if by super-majority you mean filibuster-proof, then in reality this was nowhere near 2 years.
Al Franken (the 60th vote) was not seated until the court challenges finished on June 30th.
Ted Kennedy died August 25. So that is about 8 weeks of super-majority.
Paul Kirk was seated on Sept 24, and Scott Brown took over on February 5th. So a little over 4 more months.
That is a total of about 6 calendar months of filibuster proof majority.
A glance at the legislative calendar shows a total of a little over 110 total Senate legislative days, out of a total of about 350 legislative days in 2009/2010.
So in reality, Obama had a filibuster proof majority for about 1/3 of his first 2 years.
You're correct, I meant filibuster proof. On everything else you mention, the major pieces of the ACA-- given it was a #1 priority-- could have been laid down well in advance so that things were ready to go once the people were in place.
I am probably being unfair though: cleaning up the end of the financial crisis took significant effort as well, so managing that and any single piece of significant legislation should be counted as a productive half-term. I suppose that even if all pieces of the ACA had been in place for the earliest possible vote, it still would not have left a lot of time for another significant bit of progressive legislation.
However I stand by my core point, which was perhaps not well expressed: Obama's campaign message conveyed a significant progressive agenda (at least on the domestic front). I don't think that was false on his part. I think the extent to which that agenda was not achieved is because after the mid terms there was no chance of passing progressive legislation.
Again, I think I botched my prior comment by not making that clear. I may have botched this one as well... Let me know, I like to know when I'm wrong.
Can you provide a source for COVID deaths? Is there a source that gives the number of deaths that were caused by COVID and nothing else? They say that anyone who died and tested positive for the presence of COVID was considered a COVID death even if they got hit by a bus for example. And many elderly people died from it who were on the brink of death and were just as likely to die from some other minor insult. I wonder how many life hours were lost, I think that might be a more accurate metric.
Traffic deaths in USA over 2 years ~80,000. Nobody cares.
>Traffic deaths in USA over 2 years ~80,000. Nobody cares.
Many people do care about this and advocate for less car infrastructure, safer streets, better walkability and better public transport. Car centric design was the worst mistake of the last few decades.
There is a clear positive return on those traffic deaths. We live far richer lives because of motor vehicles and what quick private transportation unlocks. I think car centric design is great personally.
Debatable but there is a lot of research showing long car commutes are taking a significant toll on mental health and physical health. We have constantly rising rates of depression, stress and obesity. All things that are partially linked to car usage.
We live far richer lives due to a huge array of technological progressions.
An anecdote but my life massively improved when I got rid of my car and moved somewhere where walking is my only transport method needed. I'm healthier, happier, and have more free time.
Do you think that a car centric society such as the US has benefited its residents more than a society which has moved away from car centric city design such as the Netherlands?
Mortality doesn’t seem to have spiked. It’s just continued the trend upward that started in 2009. Looking at a chart of mortality, I don’t see anything.
Without their bizarre accounting, the actual number is closer to $2T spent.
It's apples and oranges, but since people love making the comparison, the last 20 years of war would be enough to cover the cost of Medicare for All for... 6 months.
The USA wasted 1 trillion just in that dumpster called Afghanistan, only to see its biggest rival, China, be the only one to secure mining rights with the Taliban. They really learned nothing from recent history.
This was a major defeat in the geopolitical chess game.
As we did learn last year with Irene Triplett, the last person who got money from the us civil war, a war is not over, when no gun does shot. For many, many years pension has to be paid.
It’s so odd that people treat this as if that money has evaporated. It was spent by the US in the US. I don’t know any billionaire defense contractors but I could be wrong. That means the money was spent on workers and equipment. The former creates jobs the later pushes our envelope of technological know-how forward, think DARPA => internet. Lastly the dollar is the world reserve currency. We’re not really paying for every dollar we spend, there is a lot of leverage we have in deciding what countries get to pay what portion of each dollar we borrow. To fight this, is the main reason euro was created and why the European Union came to be. Last I checked Eurozone is not doing so well economically.
A staggering sum, but not surprising. I wonder how the last 20 years would have played out if we reacted to 9/11 with humility and soul searching instead of jingoism. I mean, the blowback in the Middle East didn’t come out of nowhere. Hopefully we will learn from this and back to walking softly.
The little fact I keep in my mind on this topic is for a fraction of this cost the USA could have simply purchased all of non-urbanized Canada, and this would surely have been a far better investment.
And a sizable portion of the population believes the government should take on more responsibility, as if those outcomes will be better somehow. It’s Gell-Mann amnesia of another kind.
The money spent on the military does trickle down to create a set of jobs and funds some research work.
That said, it doesn't seem like the best capital allocation. Spending so much human capital, time and effort on trying to put together metal objects which either shoot bullets or blow up isn't the most useful endeavor esp. when there is not much competition to necessitate the efforts.
There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. - smedley butler
War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. - smedley butler
War is just a racket... I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. - smedley butler
Major General Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 – June 21, 1940), nicknamed "Old Gimlet Eye",[1] was a senior United States Marine Corps officer who fought in both the Mexican Revolution and World War I. During his 34-year career as a Marine, he participated in military actions in the Philippines, China, and Central America; the Caribbean during the Banana Wars; and France in World War I. Butler was, at the time of his death, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. By the end of his career, Butler had received 16 medals, five for heroism. He is one of 19 men to receive the Medal of Honor twice, one of three to be awarded both the Marine Corps Brevet Medal (along with Wendell Neville and David Porter) and the Medal of Honor, and the only Marine to be awarded the Brevet Medal and two Medals of Honor, all for separate actions.
In 1933, he became involved in a controversy known as the Business Plot, when he told a congressional committee that a group of wealthy industrialists were planning a military coup to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with Butler selected to lead a march of veterans to become dictator, similar to fascist regimes at that time. The individuals involved all denied the existence of a plot, and the media ridiculed the allegations, but a final report by a special House of Representatives Committee confirmed some of Butler's testimony.
Butler later became an outspoken critic of American wars and their consequences. In 1935, Butler wrote a book titled War Is a Racket, where he describes and criticizes the workings of the United States in its foreign actions and wars, such as those in which he had been involved, including the American corporations and other imperialist motivations behind them.
I would highly recommend the audiobook of his book from 1920s:
Warning from 1920s: WAR IS A RACKET by Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler - FULL AudioBook:
Keep in mind our opponents were farmers and herders who took up found weaponry. I wonder what their end of the bill looks like. Probably not 6.4 trillion.
Having spent a decade involved with the military, both big (as a Navy fighter pilot) and small (a tour in Baghdad assisting special forces), I’m disgusted by the waste, destructiveness, and ineffectiveness of these wars. Some of the events that stick in my memory:
In 2007, Marine prowler pilots ran it up the chain of command that they were having “zero” effects stopping IEDs in Iraq. They were told to shut up and keep flying the missions even though ground forces would turn off their “effective” vehicle jammers thinking the planes provided support.
My friend, flying an F-18, found insurgents shooting rockets at a base, and instead of using a laser or gps guided bomb to take out the threat, he was told to spot for artillery, which preceded to miss the target on multiple shots until the enemy drove away.
One of the more effective planes that JSOC leveraged was the super tucano, that could fly at $600 per flight hour versus $10k for an F-18, and also do a better job. Big Navy and Air Force joined together to shut down the program trying to expand its usage.
The massive number of contractors in Baghdad, driving around brand new F-350s. Getting paid ungodly sums of money next to their poorly paid military counterparts. Ex-pilots getting paid $20k+ a month for a job I’d happily have done instead of my near meaningless ground-tour job. The SF guys complaining about their “support” contractors getting paid $1k a day and taking none of the risks.
Patraeus having a peace deal with Sadr that said US troops wouldn’t enter Sadr City, but of course, all the attacks started being launched from there. So he wanted SF to go in with their Iraq counterparts, not on official orders, but just from a phone call, and not to file a secret after-action report, all so he could claim plausible deniability. An awesome SF captain said “fuck that” and his leadership agreed, telling the general he could provide the order over a phone call but they wouldn’t stop filing after-action reports.
I remember Tailhook and all the admirals, McCain, and CEOs of leading contractors all schmoozing it up. Proceeding to build planes and weapons the operators didn’t want: one plane to do everything (JSF), a crapy Navy ATFLIR (when the Sniper was better). Topgun instructors were ordered not to talk about deploying Sniper pods on F-18s. I’m sure some of the admirals are probably on the board of directors now.
The level of grift in senior leadership is just amazing. What an embarrassing moment for the talking heads and leaders of our national security apparatus. Afghanistan should never have been more than SF and airpower. And the Iraq war never should have been. We can’t build nations with the military. But once a war starts, everyone wants to play because it’s the money spigot. Not too different from large civilian orgs.
But really this is all our fault. I remember sitting in a palace on a hill in Baghdad, in an SF operations center, watching a wall-full of flatscreen displays, with predator feeds of young SF soldiers risking their lives, next to talking heads screaming about the developing financial crisis. Seeing the massive outcry and response to the stock market crashing, I realized the wars were just a tv show and didn’t really matter. No one cared, especially compared to their pocketbook. And once I got out in 2011, I didn’t pay much attention myself either. But I do vote now for politicians who talk about reducing the US military presence abroad and view with disgust fake hawks who’ve never served but are happy to send others to war for American prestige. And good on Biden for finally pulling the plug even if the execution bordered on incompetence. There probably really wasn’t another option. Listen to the generals who’d say “stay, we can’t give up”…. the endless graft. A sad time for many of the Afghan people. /rant.
Imagine if we spent that money on a new version of the Marshall Plan and created new markets for our economy. Instead we bomb and shoot people for no reason and create a generation of people who hate us.
I guess if you live in a high income tax state, make more than the AMT threshold, max out your 401k and health insurance, etc. and compare your employer's cost to employ you by what gets deposited in your bank account at the end of the month, you can end up with a number like this. I agree that it's misleading, because your 401k, health insurance, etc. aren't taxes, and neither is your employer's payroll tax (for you anyway), but on some level it makes sense -- $200,000 a year leave your employer's bank account, and $100,000 a year ends up in yours. It's misleading to call that a 50% tax, but more like 50% overhead-some-of-which-goes-to-the-government-and-some-of-it-pays-for-other-peoples-healthcare-and-some-of-it-makes-up-for-how-useless-social-security-will-be-when-you-retire. That's a mouthful, so I can see why people map that to "tax" in their mind ;)
BTW, reading some of the other comments in this thread -- they point out property tax and sales tax. Good call.
The top US tax bracket is 37% and top California bracket is 13.3% for a total marginal rate of of 50.3%. If you're self-employed or a contractor you'll have the employer side too so I could see that hitting 55%. And that's just income tax; property and sales tax could easy push higher than that.
A poor person isn't paying that rate, but a wealthy person may well
1. Marginal tax rate. Effective is much lower. For example, I am in the 24% marginal bracket(almost in the 32% bracket, but my effective tax rate is below 15%.
2. FICA-SS makes up the majority of FICA tax and caps out at ~$140k which means that it has diminishing effective tax rate beyond that amount. Though Medicare does go from 1.45 up to 2.something at some amount of income.
3. Tax rates generally don't stack the way that you made them. ie: You can't just add tax rates together.
4. Sales and Property taxes are consumption taxes and are choices.
You can play all these games about taxes, but when you actually do the tax math, it's never as much as people think it is. That's not to say taxes aren't high in California: https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator#vDUUV..., but being single and earning $1MM gets you to like a 47% effective tax rate. Even with a large property tax bill and sales tax, you aren't getting to 55%.
There are three orders of magnitude between the number you quoted and one billion. Also note that at the billionaire scale, there are cost effective ways to avoid taxes such that one’s effective rate is less than that of a typical hundred-thousandaire.
You need to add sales tax and property tax possibly. Sales tax is approximately 9%. Property tax is about 1% of inflation adjusted value of the property.
Clearly not directly, but if you fold in non-tax payments that are commonly paid for with taxes in other countries, or taxes paid by your employer for the privilege of having you on their payroll, then maybe it is close to 55%? Income tax, social security, medicare, your personal healthcare, payroll taxes, sales tax, etc.
Most wealthy people spend another 1-2% of their income on property taxes and a bit on sales taxes, etc. I estimate I pay 53% of my income to taxes. I agree that 55% is unlikely tho
The 37% and 13.3% are on marginal income, as I'm sure you know. The effective tax rate is much lower.
California and some other states also have required disability insurance that is taken out with the state income tax. It's 1% in CA.
And I would count Social Security and Medicare too, equally 7.65%. But the SS part has a cap so the percentage goes down the more you make.
All put together, someone making $250K pays about 37% on that to various income taxes listed above. If you were making 1M income a year, that rises to 47%. For 100K, it's about 30%.
The employer pays the same social security and medicare taxes as the employee and also has a cap on the social security part, plus in some cases an unemployment tax.
If you want to include employer taxes, to calculate if the employer wants to pay you 250K how much you would get, then it's be about 42%. At 100K, it'd be about 38% since you don't reach the SS cap.
Of course, there's a couple other tricks in there, like the government can embed some tax into the healthcare costs which are required for employers to buy, but then there's also deductions that are hard to turn into a percentage like this.
I spent an hour arguing about taxes with someone until I realized that they didn't understand how marginal taxes worked. I bet you dollars to donuts that if you start talking about taxes in a room full of upper-middle class people, one will tell you about people choosing not to earn more money so they don't get "bumped" into a higher tax rate.
Total U.S. assets amount to about $225 trillion. Spending 1/700th of that per year for the past 20 years to protect those assets seems a reasonable investment.
Wrong US companies got the money, like BlackRock that owns 9trillion dollars in US assets, invests in weapons, including cluster munitions [2] and are untouchable[1]:
Because they are the ones who lent the US the money. China is the #2 holder of US treasury bonds and currently own about 1T worth. (4% of the US national debt) Japan is the #1 holder at 1.2T. Source: https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt
Obviously you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
BOND. Issued by US government. Is a promise that US will pay back the price of the bond at some predetermined future date and in the meantime it will also be paying interest in regular installments.
Others (including other countries) buy US bonds, which finances US spending. You know, whenever there is this big debate about whether to close US government or not?
So it is kinda stupid to say "no one lent us money", because, you know, they did.
But as a fuller reply to your overly condescending post is that a)yes the BOND procedure is borrowing, but b)the majority of new money is created through the fractional reserve system, which requires banks to hold 10% in reserve when creating loans. When banks give out new loans they are in fact creating almost 10 times as much new money, well exceeding the whole bond mechanism.
Now I admit that this is not my field, but it certainly seems that if the majority of new money that is created is through the fractional reserve system, i.e. by fiat, then the majority of the money that is spent buying new BONDS is from fiat-produced money.
See and respond to my other post. It seems reasonable to assume that most of the money that was lent to us via the BOND/Treasury ultimately came from fiat money creation via the banks through the fractional reserve system.
> Unfortunately, interest on that debt is real and is owed to other countries.
Most of that debt is internal.
Highlights from the March 2021 report
* Federal Reserve and government: $10.81 trillion (December 2020)
* Foreign: $7.07 trillion (in September 2020, Japan owned $1.28 trillion and China owned $1.06 trillion of U.S. debt, which is more than a third of foreign holdings)
* Mutual funds: $3.5 trillion
* Other holders, including individuals, government-sponsored enterprises, brokers and dealers, banks, bank personal trusts and estates, corporate and non-corporate businesses, and other investors: $2.28 trillion
* State and local governments, including their pension funds: $1.09 trillion
* Private pension funds: $784 billion
* Insurance companies: $253 billion
* U.S. savings bonds: $147 billion (December 2020)
There isn't an "opportunity cost" as the article discusses, there's no evidence that Congress would have spent that money on something else. It doesn't sit in an account and then they allocate it, they make it up on paper and then try (and fail) to cover it later.
The simplest way to look at it is the national debt would be 22.6T instead of 28.6T. That’s one option where nothing changes except war or no wars. Many people say national debt has zero impacts but eventually nobody is going to be lending the US money if we don’t pay our debt, which one way or another leads to a world of hurt.
However, to get that debt we needed to borrowing money from someone and agree to pay them interest. We could have also browned the same money and lowered taxes, or borrowed the same money and had free universal healthcare or whatever other government spending we wanted.
`nobody is going to be lending the US money if we don’t pay our debt,`
1) The Fed can loan money by simply creating new dollars and purchasing treasury bills. This has been happening for a long time, T-Bills do first get offered to private institutions but the Fed backstops all auctions.
2) There is literally no way for the US Gov to go involuntarily bankcrupt because of 1). It is the sole manufacturer of US dollars and can always create more.
Well, apparently they become economic superpowers because that is what all powerful nations with monetary sovereignty and fiat money have been doing under the guise of government debt.
Hyperinflation largely happens in countries where the money wasn't really worth much to begin with because it's value was pegged to the price of gold or other currencies. Or because most of the economy functioned on foreign currency and the government borrowed in foreign currency. In this case printing more money to service foreign debt or imports can quickly spiral out of control because as soon as the trust in the local currency erodes it essentially doesn't matter anymore if you have 100 or 100T of it. It's worthless paper.
Taxes are paid in a nations currency which creates demand for the currency scaled to their economy. Borrowing money is the only way to get spending > taxes without an exponential increase in the amount of money generated every year. That exponential growth then gets worse as the economy tanks and debt explodes. It’s been demonstrated repeatedly, things get out of control extremely quickly.
There is a little wiggle room. Governments do get to create a little money as their economies grow or if it’s used in foreign economies without causing significant inflation, but it’s dangerous to just spend it directly. The issue of course excessive printing or any economic contraction.
PS: Foreign debt is of course a closely related issue, but countries don’t create foreign debt unless they are forced to. You can’t get hyper inflation with a currency actually pegged to another currency or gold, those ties break long before hyper inflation happen.
There are better and deeper ways of understanding money. You think fiscally sovereign nations need to borrow their own currency, and that isn't correct. You think government spending necessarily precipitates a currency crisis, and this is not only incorrect but goes against the demonstrated history of the United States from the 40s until today.
It seems like you are conflating the role of private and public debt, which is a very common mistake. Private debt does cause economic crises, public debt is a misnomer - it's generally speaking not even correctly referred to as debt. It's referred to as a debt for historical reasons, its not owed to anyone, for example.
A paper by the CATO institute showed that world hyperinflations have not historically arisen from monetary policy changes. They have more to do with... eh, its complicated. Collapses of industry in wartime, famines, militarily-imposed foreign debts and single-resource economies living beyond their means. The understanding you are demonstrating is called the Quantity Theory of Money and its being more and more called into question. The Theory of Ricardian Equivalence is toast. Not sure if you know that those are the high-falutin names of the theories you are describing as being patent fact.
> You think fiscally sovereign nations need to borrow in their own currency
No, it can be quite beneficial. However, it’s more dangerous to borrow in foreign currency because exchange rates are outside of complete government control.
> You think government spending necessarily precipitates a currency crisis
No, the inability to borrow in their own currency is one possibility. Bad monetary policy is another, losing a war for existence is another.
We're never going to pay it, and no we couldn't have gotten universal healthcare. If they had the votes, they would have done both, regardless of cost. They don't have the votes for universal healthcare.
Only up to a point, try borrowing say 50 million dollars while making 50k. Before lending money people look at your existing debt load to determine if your likely to pay it back. The same thing happens to countries, though more smoothly as they first require higher interest rates.
Except Greece for example recently hit it’s borrowing limit with spiraling interest rates. If it could have borrowed unlimited money at zero interest nothing bad would have happened, it could have paid debts with new loans.
Ignore money. Think in terms of stuff. Metal that gets put into Humvees can't be put into something else. We threw away an insane amount of stuff.
And think in terms of people. People that spend a year as soldiers in Afghanistan can't spend that year doing something else. We threw an insane amount of people-time, and a tragically insane amount of people.
There is an opportunity cost in terms of both stuff and people. We can print money, but we can't print stuff or people.
> Think in terms of stuff. Metal that gets put into Humvees can't be put into something else. We threw away an insane amount of stuff.
Much of that stuff has actually found itself in the hands of those it was made to fight against. This is significantly worse than throwing it away in my opinion.
> People that spend a year as soldiers in Afghanistan can't spend that year doing something else.
The greatest asset the US has built up over the past twenty or so years fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan is a reserve of soldiers with real world military experience. I’m not saying it justifies the cost. Far from it. But it’s not a complete wash from a mid term strategic analysis.
Given how the army was incompetent in really doing anything from looking at released documents (https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/120416649507430400...), I think the experience in Iraq and Afghanistan would have actually deteriorated the quality and morale of the army.
Some of those examples are not very stellar examples, I understand that they are just samples but trying to share some of my experiences to help illustrate a better picture. If listening to locals about placing a well or a playground or a zoo, I think you'll quickly get people saying yeah closer to us and not them. You are allocated finite resources to help improve living conditions, sometimes there are compromises. Just noting that transporting fuel by helicopter should not be the gauge regarding incompetence. Many of the bases are very remote, there are different fuel types and/or routes could have been closed and the requirement to get fuel to a location or other emergencies might be a driving factor. But it does sound like something that is pretty inefficient and dangerous.
From my experience and social contacts, I don't think "incompetence" at doing anything is accurate or would I describe it as affecting morale. There are inefficiencies and incompetency with leadership or supply chains, some of this waste is part of running such a large organization like the military. One that sticks in my mind is having 60 people assigned to shake debris out of parachutes when there are only 25 hooks to hang the parachutes on, requiring US mail to be transported by US citizens, and I'm nit picking here: US Air Force intra-Base Security Police enforcing a 15 MPH speed limit...
There have been many lessons that have been learned, from these conflicts and I think a large contributing factor to the cost is rapid procurement of enhanced equipment such as individual and vehicular armor improvements; equipment that had been identified in review's as being a deficiency.
I think a positive attribute around the military is what is being viewed and cited, is lessons and critique. The Army does have strong systems in place for reviewing actions. I think it's something that I try to take a utilize in the civilian sector. I think there is waste, and certainly there could be modifications to improve efficiency, but I also think for a very large organization it does fairly well, and modernized fairly well to the challenges that were presented. However if I were joking around with some friends, I would totally would be tossing around incompetence left and right (haha)!
The greatest asset the US has built up over the past twenty or so years fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan is a reserve of soldiers with real world military experience.
The average term of enlistment in the USA military is 15 years, 11 years for officers. So that experience gets lost quickly unless we keep getting embroiled in new wars.
There's no way the average term of enlistment is 15 years. Very few people choose to re-enlist after their first term, or are even allowed to. In 2016, there were almost 200k Marines, and they were struggling to get 10k people to re-enlist after their first 4 years[1].
I just used the snippet returned a Google search, which said:
The average length of enlistment for U.S. military personnel is just under 15 years for all branches. The average service time for officers is a bit less, averaging about 11 years. The U.S. Air Force has an average enlistment time of 14.7 years. Oct 4, 2017
Surprisingly, it does include references, but only one of them still exists, which backs up the 11 year number for officers, but not for general enlisted:
The average officer in 2009 had been in the military nearly 11 years, slightly more than a year longer than the average in 1973.
The pattern among enlisted personnel is more complicated. The average length of service for enlisted personnel rose from 5.8 years in 1973 to a peak of 7.5 in 1994 and 1996, but then began drifting downward and now stands at 6.7 years.
Nah, it was a wash. Senior military officials have been telling the president what needs to be done in Afghanistan since Bush was president, and they've been ignored by every administration. Afghanistan absolutely could have been "won", but politicians won't think past the start of their next election campaign.
Absolutely not. Waste fuels the economy. There's no shortage of metal, only the price of metal.
As for people, spending a couple of years in the military is much better personal development for many young people than going to college at an age when most people can't appreciate it.
These things aside, of course the loss of life is horrific and a terrible waste.
> There's no shortage of metal, only the price of metal
Metal is a non-renewable resource. Cost of extraction does not match market price, more so when unnecessary demand is created for wars. What kind of spin is this?
I don't think you can call material sources renewable, well unless we talk wood, leather or whale fat I guess.
But in general metals can be recycled quite well and often are recycled due to their price. Also even if you finely shredded it and mixed it with other stuff the resulting mix would still most likely have higher grade than regular ore & mining it would thus be economicaly viable.
There could be asteroids of pure palladium, platinum, gold, and silver, and it wouldn't matter a fig until it was cost competitive with digging rocks out of the ground, sticking them on a slow barge to a massive refinery and processing them with cheap, probably exploitative, labor.
What I originally said was there's no metal shortage, only the price of metal. We'll be mining the solar system long before we run out of metal on earth. For aluminum, for instance, there's an insane amount in the Earth's crust.
Except we don't just print money and give it away. The money is borrowed (backed by some asset), and this distinction matters. IOW, the money that gets printed is (generally) non-inflationary.
Stop using what you learned in your Econ 1XX level courses to try and reason about government spending and money operations, especially, US government spending and money operations. What you learned is not applicable.
Seems like inflation is skyrocketing to me. Specifically asset inflation. Housing prices, stocks, bitcoin, etc. Basically dollar becoming worth less against these assets thanks to QE.
House prices are a real issue, although I don't think that's only because of increased money supply.
Otherwise, does it matter? What's the impact on ordinary people if bitcoin is worth 100 or 1 mio dollars? Notwithstanding the fact that the number of people actively buying financial assets has gone up a lot in recent years, which is bound to increase prices.
There is no such thing as asset inflation. If the price of assets is going up, then they are going up. It sucks that housing is considered an asset (it shouldn't, it should be a consumable) but that is the long and short of it. And you can't have an average 2% inflation target and underperform that target for a decade+, then complain when there is inflation above 2%(which is transitory and caused by simultaneous demand and supply shocks due to covid).
Government debt isn't guaranteed by anything, expect by the promise that it'll be paid back (although it won't be). Commercial banks can also borrow money that is guaranteed by government instead of being backed by any asset. Expanding the money supply always causes money to lose value.
You don't get it. It couldn't have been spent on something else. If the day before 9/11 Congress had passed universal healthcare, free college, and basic income, they still would have spent this money on a war. Are you saying they could have said, oh we got attacked, let's estimate the cost of a war and put it into healthcare?
But I do think you miss the point, so aptly put by Mr Eisenhower:
“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.”
In a strictly limited sense, I’d rather get my cross of iron at 66% off than for the full $6.4T. Better yet would be universal healthcare, enough homes to go round, clean, sustainable energy production systems, and bridges that keep on bridging.