[HN Gopher] How we paid for the War on Terror
___________________________________________________________________
How we paid for the War on Terror
Author : riverlong
Score : 82 points
Date : 2021-08-23 19:07 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (adamtooze.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (adamtooze.substack.com)
| keewee7 wrote:
| Why is American warfare so expensive?
|
| Russian, French and Turkish interventionism in the Middle East
| and Africa are an order of magnitude smaller but they seem to
| have accomplished more than the US/NATO did in Afghanistan.
|
| The Iraq war is a complicated beast. The Iraqis I know feel the
| country improved for the better but US foreign policy on Israel-
| Palestine and warmongering against Iran (most Iraqis are Shia)
| has eroded whatever goodwill they had after the fall of Saddam.
| ProAm wrote:
| > Why is American warfare so expensive?
|
| The real question isn't why is it expensive, but why so
| ineffective?
| 3009629147 wrote:
| It is effective, you just aren't aware of what it is trying
| to accomplish.
| marvinalone wrote:
| This guy had a great breakdown for why the US military is so
| expensive:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/71bq8h/cmv_th...
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Why is American warfare so expensive? Russian, French and
| Turkish interventionism in the Middle East and Africa are an
| order of magnitude smaller but they seem to have accomplished
| more than the US/NATO did in Afghanistan.
|
| I'm no apologist for the US, quite the opposite. However if you
| want a good comparison, compare the how various empires fared
| in Afghanistan, it's as close to like-for-like as we will ever
| get.
|
| The US, Britain and Russia all did miserably. Wasted time,
| lives and money and they have caused huge harm while losing.
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| Well, because the project isn't warfare as such. The project is
| wealth transfer from public to private hands _via_ something
| that looks like war. Yet more socialism for the ultra-wealthy,
| in other words. In this incentive structure, spending more than
| needed is the point.
|
| While it wouldn't be true to say that the US hasn't had
| "military goals" in Afghanistan, I'd make the claim that these
| were never really the point. Like most of the defense budget,
| this has been about enriching a specific sector of the American
| elite, and by that metric they've succeeded tremendously. In
| fact, judging from the media reaction to the US leaving the
| past ten days, they seem to have thought it'd last a lot longer
| than 20 years.
| bsedlm wrote:
| Or in the case of Iraq and the war on terror, wealth transfer
| from everything and everybody in that region back to the
| private owners of the military-industrial apparatus.
| adventured wrote:
| Iraqi is back to pumping record oil flows and its GDP per
| capita is already back to being higher than Jordan,
| Ukraine, Egypt, Indonesia or the Philippines. It's not
| terribly far away from Colombia or South Africa.
|
| How does that represent Iraq's wealth being transferred to
| the military industrial complex? The exact opposite
| happened. The US lost enormous sums of money and also
| didn't keep or take Iraq's oil (which is the extreme
| majority of their national wealth). The US has absolutely
| nothing economically to show for its ridiculously dumb
| attempt to nation build influence in Iraq.
|
| If the US wanted a forever stable supply of Iraqi oil,
| Saddam would have happily arranged that, even at an under
| the (OPEC) table discount.
|
| China will be by far the biggest economic beneficiary of
| both the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. They're going to
| partner with the Taliban and mine the heck out of
| Afghanistan, and they'll buy a lot of Iraqi oil. So what's
| the premise, we did both wars at the behest of China,
| because the US is now the puppet of China? I get it, we did
| it for China for the oil!
|
| In 2019 Iraq exported $74b of crude. $21b of that went to
| China, $19b went to India. $6b went to the US.
|
| So the US spent trillions of dollars to secure an annual
| $6b flow of oil, which could have trivially been secured
| from Saddam (and a lot more than that)? Nope. That's not
| why the US invaded Iraq at all.
| xxpor wrote:
| >In 2019 Iraq exported $74b of crude. $21b of that went
| to China, $19b went to India. $6b went to the US.
|
| Wait, that's it??
|
| $74 billion in the grand scheme of things is... not much.
|
| If you'd asked me to guess I'd have expected something
| like $500 billion or more.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| Its forgotten how many benefits warfare can bring to humanity.
| WW2 transformed the US into a global superpower and an industrial
| powerhouse of unprecedented scale. Technologies invented to aid
| warfare are improving the quality of life (e.g. aircraft, radar,
| computers, internet etc etc.) I think that the war industry
| actually brings us tremendous benefits with a good ROI.
| bsedlm wrote:
| > There is a productive apparatus and resources that feed it -
| what we are gesturing towards when we talk about "the economy".
| They can be mobilized using flows of spending generated by public
| or private credit, to move in one direction or another.
|
| > It wasn't pouring money into the sand. Most of the dollars
| flowed back to America.
|
| Fiat based money (in which currency -- circulating money, is
| actually debt) works fine when this money is used to build (and
| maintain?) infrasctucture, markets, industries, which can then
| "pay back" this debt; which can sustain a society.
|
| The truly sad part, most would agree, is that they'd use this for
| destructive purposes.
|
| First use fiat-credit to fund a war to break a foreign country
| and then loan out more credit to pay for rebuilding it. The end
| result is a transfer of (at least) ownership back to America.
| jessaustin wrote:
| This is true but understated. A third of humanity is subject to
| some sort of economic sanctions or embargo, which invariably are
| instituted as some sort of pretext for future war. This costs the
| global economy some huge amount, but for the specific nations
| targeted most brutally (Venezuela, Iran, etc.) it leads to many
| more deaths because medicines and other healthcare supplies
| cannot be imported.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| Iran is led by bloodthirsty dictators. If not for the sanctions
| they would have likely started wars with half the Middle East.
| Now they are merely antagonizing half the Middle East.
| macroninomics wrote:
| Michael Hudson's "Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy Of
| Imperial America" explains:
|
| "When the US payment deficit pumps dollars into foreign
| economies, these banks (have) little option except to buy US
| Treasury bills and bonds which the Treasury spends on financing
| an enormous, hostile military build-up to encircle (today's)
| major dollar-recyclers China, Japan and Arab OPEC oil producers"
| - essentially a process by which they finance their own
| endangerment.
|
| From https://www.countercurrents.org/lendman010709.htm
|
| Additional links:
|
| https://mronline.org/2021/02/09/michael-hudson-changes-in-su...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtHX23Trvy4
| 3009629147 wrote:
| I respect Michael Hudson but he is slightly wrong here. They
| can also buy U.S. stocks like the Swiss Central Bank does. [1]
|
| [1]
| https://sec.report/Document/0001582202-21-000003/?__cf_chl_j...
| dalbasal wrote:
| OK so this is kind of wordy... Let me try to point out the
| guts...
|
| _no one would deny that in an economy operating at 100 percent
| full capacity - as in the kind of European war economy that
| Keynes analyzed in the 1940s - crowding out may occur. But that
| is a highly unusual state of affairs and is precisely not what a
| progressive analysis of capitalism should take for granted. There
| is no reason to believe that the US economy at any point in the
| last 20 years has operated close to that absolute limit, at which
| trade offs are zero sum._
|
| Keyne's "how to pay for the war" booklet is all about how to
| suppress consumption through saving, rationing and such. Actual
| consumption needed to be suppressed, because factories needed to
| make tanks instead of cars. The book is _not_ about how to print
| money, deal with finance markets, etc. We 'd call that "fiscal
| policy."
|
| Fighting WW2 genuinely pushed the UK's financial limits. The
| problem wasn't ability to borrow, inflation, money markets &
| such. The problem was the ability of its economy to support such
| a big military effort.
|
| The point of this blog, I think, is that there was never a "how
| to pay for the war" pamphlet for afghanistan. US & NATO
| industries and economies were capable of supporting the war,
| accounted for as a deficit, without austerity like Keyne's
| prescribed for the UK. Hence capacity.
| bsedlm wrote:
| There's also a key difference between WW2 and the war on
| terror, which is fiat money created in the 70s (around Nixon's
| time). Right around the start of the war on drugs.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| That matters less than you seem to think. Printing money
| doesn't magically create more stuff, nor does it change the
| economy's ability to create more stuff. It just changes who
| has the ability to buy what the real economy creates.
|
| And...
|
| > Right around the start of the war on drugs.
|
| What, specifically, are you vaguely hinting at?
| borski wrote:
| This is a genuinely fascinating and eye-opening way to look at
| it. I had never considered it from the perspective of the
| Keynesian economic machine.
| avalys wrote:
| The simple explanation here is that 200 billion per year over 20
| years is unquestionably a lot of money, but not large enough
| relative to overall US government spending ($7T per year) to
| perturb anything all that much.
| hogFeast wrote:
| Reducing his analysis to MMT, as some here are doing, suggests
| that you don't know about Tooze's area of study. His magnum opus,
| probably one of the greatest books in modern economic history,
| looked at precisely these questions of govt spending being taken
| to the limit (in Nazi Germany).
|
| But, a bit like those who specialise in Japanese economic
| history, I feel like it is pretty misleading to base your
| argument for MMT on purely wartime measures: not only is the
| level of govt spending changing but the allocation of resources
| is changing...that is very different to a non-wartime economy
| where there aren't huge supply changes.
|
| After WW2, there was huge economic dislocation and inflation. But
| it seems very churlish to look at WW2 and say: there are no
| limits to spending. When: most economies in the world effectively
| shut down, trade shut down, there was massive destruction of
| supply, massive financial repression...financial repression in
| the US, by far the economy that was least negatively impacted,
| didn't end in truth until the mid-60s. The UK economy didn't
| recover in full until the 90s.
|
| Crowding out does occur. It isn't unusual. There is ample
| evidence of it occurring. It is dangerous to point out too that
| "there is no limit" and then fail to mention that your only
| sources for this claim are dictatorships or countries at
| war...there is a reason for this (it is often politically
| unpalatable to take control over production such that crowding
| out is prevented).
|
| The reason why there was no crowding out, to be blunt, is that
| these wars weren't very expensive. They provide no evidence to
| support the claim that: that we are nowhere close to the real
| limit on spending. Almost every industry right now has shortages,
| and the economy isn't close to full capacity because the labour
| participation rate is low? Rakakakakaka.
|
| I like Tooze but this is very weak stuff (it is worth pointing
| out though, that the last part of the previous paragraph is
| essentially the Fed's position...so we will likely find out who
| is right).
|
| It is also interesting that he didn't mention the 1920s more
| either...this is the ultimate "proof" that austerity makes no
| sense. But it is also worth pointing out that after WW1, lots of
| countries had the same issues after WW2. There were huge price
| changes in 1920 that basically felled the UK economy until the
| 90s (WW2 and US actions after were just the final nail in the
| coffin), it is quite foolish to suppose that the UK economy would
| have just magically recovered if the govt started spending...it
| was a supply-side issue, not a problem with demand (the US was
| the counter-point to this, the US started the decade with a
| relatively blank slate and this decade turned the US into a
| financial power competing with the UK...the UK was legacy, stuck
| with all the old industries that were shrinking, and struggled to
| retool after the war ended)...but yeah, usually every economic
| narrative that takes the Keynesian approach will mention 1920s
| UK...it is a classic (although misleading) example.
| klelatti wrote:
| Not sure if it's your intention here but it sounds like you're
| saying Tooze only knows about fiscal policy because he's
| written a book on Germany in WW2.
|
| Apart from anything else he's written probably the best book on
| the 2008 financial crisis and the Eurozone crisis.
| hogFeast wrote:
| Yep, I studied economic history, I have read all of his books
| (including his first book on statistics in early 20th century
| Germany). His latest book wasn't that well received, and it
| is very far from the best book on the 2008 financial crisis
| (it is far too early to say which book is the best, but Tooze
| framed that book in terms of the bete noires of the left at
| the time, Trump and Brexit, which massively takes away from
| the book's broader relevance...it happens, it is how
| publishers sell books, it is not how writers produce great
| ones). Deluge and Wages of Destruction are considered his
| best books, and Wages is clearly superior (Deluge and Crashed
| are really more popular history).
|
| Either way, I don't think I made any specific claims about
| the limits of Tooze's knowledge (I have no real idea what
| Tooze does or does not know). My point was simple: if you
| look solely at Nazi Germany fiscal policy between 1931 and
| 1944, it will appear very much like there are no limits to
| spending. He references this multiple times throughout the
| article. I also mentioned that the other very common place
| that you see this is is people who have studied Japanese
| economic policy in the 70/80s. If you take these periods and
| you want to believe that there are no limits in spending,
| these periods will allow you to make that argument (and it is
| common to see this generally: people who are experts in one
| period of history, often see everything through that
| lens...human nature). It is extremely common for people who
| believe in MMT or some variant of MMT to reference these
| periods (and again, not make any reference to other aspects
| of how that was possible i.e. politics).
|
| The problem with this is that this information does not
| generalize (and I have said specifically why this information
| doesn't generalize in these cases). He refers to post-WW2 as
| an example of there being no limit to spending but, again as
| I explain specifically, it is an example of the opposite. I
| made no claim about why that is: all I said is that Tooze's
| expertise is periods in which the limits to spending aren't
| clear, and he is referencing a period which is a the textbook
| example of limits to spending (post-WW2).
|
| I didn't say this but I know why he is making this argument:
| Tooze is left-leaning. Most economists aren't particularly
| familiar with the details of 1950s monetary policy (there are
| very few books on this subject, it isn't fashionable) but
| even if there were, people would still believe in MMT. The
| reasons why people in believe in certain things are not
| limited to evidence (Tooze was one of the public figures that
| was behind Corbyn's MMT-funded spending plans, he has taken a
| political stance on this). If this wasn't the case, I do
| suspect he would have a different interpretation of the post-
| WW2 period.
| gHosts wrote:
| > There is no pot of money in between that defines limits or
| possibilities. We should by all means spend time thinking about
| what it would be good to spend $ 5 trillion on, but given the
| available resources and the amount of slack at our disposal that
| is a case to be made independent of the spending on the war.
|
| Bollocks. The amount of productivity of each worker and the
| primary productivity of the land is finite.
|
| That is The Pot.
|
| Anything that drains that pot results in a poorer country.
| danuker wrote:
| In support of this comment, the US has a record trade deficit.
| This means it sent quite a few dollars overseas.
|
| https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/balance-of-trade
| xxpor wrote:
| And then what do people do with all of those dollars they
| just received?
|
| They buy US Treasury bonds. Or oil.
| nightski wrote:
| Historically defense spending has been decreasing as a % of
| GDP. It's as low as ~3.5% now, near the lowest it has ever
| been.
| IncRnd wrote:
| That's a percentage of GDP, but the actual military budget
| per year hasn't been decreasing like that. It's increased
| every year since 2003. See this table: Military Spending
| History [1]
|
| [1] https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-military-budget-
| components-ch...
| nightski wrote:
| I mean that chart shows it basically increasing on par with
| inflation, especially in the 2011-2021 decade. Why would
| you expect it to stay the same or decrease as our economic
| value grows?
| IncRnd wrote:
| That is not what it shows. The overall cumulative price
| change from 2003 to 2021 is just shy of 50%, yet the
| Military Spending went from $437B to $934B. Taking a
| smaller portion to support a desired statitical result is
| not scientific.
| nightski wrote:
| It's about 4.5% annualized increase over the 20 years
| (being almost flat in the second half). Yes, slightly
| higher than inflation (around 2.5% or so annualized), but
| I mean come on, it's not that large. As I pointed out,
| it's been decreasing as a % of GDP which is a more
| relevant metric.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Historically defense spending has been decreasing as a % of
| GDP. It's as low as ~3.5% now, near the lowest it has ever
| been.
|
| The lowest _peak year_ of total defense (not just war)
| spending _during a war_ appears to be 1.5% of GDP in 1899
| during the Spanish-American War [0]. 3.5% of GDP is nowhere
| near the lowest total defense spending has ever been.
|
| [0] https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/afp/warcosts.htm
| [deleted]
| VictorPath wrote:
| First, you're calling the invasion of Iraq, the bombing of
| Iran, and all the other things the US has been doing around
| the world since as far as can be remembered "defense".
| Murdering villagers in remote Vietnamese villages etc.
|
| Secondly, military spending is more than 3.5% GDP. It is only
| 3.5% if you exclude pension and health benefits due to
| retired military, interest on past military spending (past as
| in, last year's) and so on. The real military budget is
| always underreported to a large extent.
| [deleted]
| nostromo wrote:
| It's really difficult to argue with a die-hard Keynesian
| because no amount of spending will ever be too much.
|
| It's the new form of trickle-down economics... "Let's print $5T
| and hand it to defense contractors... eventually we'll all be
| better off!"
|
| There are definitely forms of mal-investment by government.
| With $5T we could have built high speed rail and fixed our
| bridges and airports and still have money left over for a
| moonshot, like, I don't know, sending humans to mars. Instead
| we bought nothing and thousands of people are dead.
| wonnage wrote:
| That's the fallacy the article is trying to combat. The war
| in Afghanistan did not take away from our capacity to build
| infrastructure at home. It's not like all the construction
| capacity in America was busy building stuff for Afghanistan.
|
| > The real limit on government spending was not some
| artificial debt ceiling, or the risk of "running out of
| money", but the productive capacity of the economy and the
| risk of sparking either inflation, or a ruinous
| multiplication of bottlenecks and dysfunctional backlogs of
| unmet orders. As Keynes said, we can afford anything we can
| actually do.
|
| But the discourse about the war (as in your comment) focuses
| entirely on all the things we could've done with that money,
| as though building bridges vs bombing people was a binary
| decision.
|
| It's not. We didn't spend $5T on war and leave our
| infrastructure crumbling because the war crowded out our
| capacity to build; we simply have decided, through our
| politics, not to bother with the latter.
|
| The irony is that MMT has been perceived as a progressive
| theory to encourage spending on social programs. But
| progressives are arguing against war using the same austerity
| economics that conservatives use to justify not spending on
| said programs. Meanwhile, nothing about MMT is actually left
| or right; in practice the military-industrial complex in our
| government is evidence that MMT works.
| strbean wrote:
| I'm pretty sure everyone complaining about the price of the
| war would be perfectly comfortable substituting the phrase
| "wasted money" with the phrase "wasted productive capacity
| and physical resources". I don't really see how this
| counter-argument is anything but quibbling over phrasing.
| bopbeepboop wrote:
| That's not true -- we bought the spy equipment the state uses
| to oppress citizens with warrantless surveillance.
| [deleted]
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The amount of productivity of each worker and the primary
| productivity of the land is finite.
|
| > That is The Pot.
|
| It's not a pot, its a stream; using the available flow isn't
| draining it (some uses, in fact, increase the future flow.)
| There are tradeoffs at the limit between present realized value
| and future flow rate, but most of the time the actual value is
| inside rather than at the boundary of the possibilities curve,
| so you its possible to improve one value without a trade-off in
| the other (unfortunately, the effects on either axis of an
| action aren't unambiguously predictable, either, so there is
| often room for reasonable disagreement about the merits of
| particular courses of action.)
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> > That is The Pot._
|
| _> It 's not a pot, its a stream; using the available flow
| isn't draining it_
|
| WRT PAYGO style government spending this is perfectly
| accurate.
|
| WRT debt-financed spending it's closer to correct than "The
| Pot" but still off (spending now doesn't drain the stream,
| but does reduce future flow for a fixed period of time).
|
| WRT a massive war it distracts from the enormous second and
| third order effects.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| what role do resources such as oil play in your Pot?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| If we had seized their oil, then it might have played a big
| one. Since we didn't, it plays none at all.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Why do you mean? Are you suggesting that the trillions spent
| needed oil or oil security or something?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Just guessing that they meant that most of the recent
| "skirmishes" have been in areas ripe with oil when similar
| if not worse things are occurring in other countries that
| we do not respond with military action.
| klelatti wrote:
| If the economy is operating at full capacity. Clearly not the
| case that the US economy was operating at full capacity over
| this period.
| Animats wrote:
| Yes. When we started the "War on Terror", there should have been
| a "War Tax". As there was in WWI and WWII. "During the Second
| World War, the top individual tax rate rose to 94 percent and
| remained at 91 percent for nearly two decades--until 1964."
| foobarian wrote:
| Yes but that was before the gold standard was abolished. There
| are other ways now.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The US left the gold standard in 1933. This was well before
| WWII.
| nemo44x wrote:
| It was in 1971.
| dylan604 wrote:
| "Upon taking office in March 1933, U.S. President
| Franklin D. Roosevelt departed from the gold
| standard.[53]"
|
| taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard
| SgtBastard wrote:
| If you're splitting hairs on domestic vs international
| redeemability for gold you're technically correct but the
| person you're replying to is more generally correct - the
| discussion of the Bretton Woods agreement in that wiki
| article is important.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 1933 was the infamous meeting in the backroom with not
| enough people to hold quorum that is what most of the
| conspiracy theory and illuminati types point to as
| evidence.
|
| plus, whether you could redeem a greenback for gold or
| not is much less of an issue if the powers that be have
| already been acting as if the gold was no longer relevant
| in their policy decisions. that's the reason i point to
| '33 vs '71. i don't care about monetary exchange formats,
| but how the system was running.
| nemo44x wrote:
| '71 was when the dollar was no longer tied to it.
| 3009629147 wrote:
| That is true, but the Bretton Woods agreement (which the
| United States signed in 1944) and subsequent System
| featured a gold standard.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| That is far from the whole story. FDR departed from the
| gold standard, devalued the dollar (or raised the price
| of gold to $35 from $20). And the price of gold was left
| fixed at $35 until 1971.
|
| Now, is that "gold is pegged to a fixed price" or
| "dollars are convertible to gold at a fixed price" the
| same as the gold standard? The very first sentence of
| that Wikipedia article says "A gold standard is a
| monetary system in which the standard economic unit of
| account is based on a fixed quantity of gold." So I would
| say that yes, by that definition we were still on the
| gold standard until 1971.
| JadeNB wrote:
| Instead we find ourselves somehow considering the idea that a
| 37% top individual tax rate is usurious.
| IncRnd wrote:
| People tithe 10% to God. Taxing 37% of income is usurious
| taxation.
|
| You would be sorely mistaken if you believed that people paid
| 94% of their income as taxation. The tax code is entirely
| different today from then.
| triceratops wrote:
| > You would be sorely mistaken if you believed that people
| paid 94% of their income as taxation
|
| Yes, because that's a marginal rate, not a effective rate.
| There's a big difference between the two, that many people
| are quick to gloss over.
| IncRnd wrote:
| > Yes, because that's a marginal rate, not a effective
| rate. There's a big difference between the two, that many
| people are quick to gloss over.
|
| Oftentimes, that happens when it is desired for some
| people to pay more than they currently are. The entire
| tax code has changed, though.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| The historical top rates were subject to a lot more
| deductions than we have today - effective tax rates were in
| the 40% range. Effective rates today are certainly lower, so
| your point stands, but the difference isn't as stark as just
| looking at marginal rates would presume.
| nightski wrote:
| Defense spending was almost 40% of GDP at that time. Now it is
| less than 5%.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| If you want to wage expensive wars and need to pay for it, you
| have two basic options: squeeze your people, or squeeze somebody
| else's people.
|
| It doesn't matter what your political slant is or even your
| economic philosophy. You don't even have to be constrained by
| your own economy. And even if you were, "your economy" might be
| so wound-up in the economies of other nations that those other
| nations end up supplementing your economy enough to pay for the
| war. Or you can just pillage. In any case, the money always comes
| from the people; you just have to figure out which people that
| ended up being.
|
| There is of course the third option: "don't pay for it". In that
| case, your government (or rulers) are generally doomed, because
| there is always somebody _with_ money who will see your faltering
| state as a juicy investment or acquisition. We seem to be in a
| "peaceful period", as countries like Venezuela still haven't been
| snapped up; but rest assured that somebody ( _cough_ China
| _cough_ ) will be by eventually to pick it up and give it a new
| coat of paint.
| seibelj wrote:
| A major problem with hyper-Keynesian MMT advocates is that it
| relies on:
|
| - Having the global reserve currency
|
| - Being able to raise taxes at will to fight inflation
|
| It may be possible that with a one-world government and global
| agreement on central currency that we could get to this. But
| instead the US only has the global reserve currency, and the
| political will to print it seemingly infinitely, but not the
| ability to raise taxes dynamically.
|
| We are already seeing high inflation (by recent US standards)
| that is beginning to become politically untenable. A full-
| throated MMT policy would be impossible in the current
| environment.
|
| Even worse there are major threats to USD as the global reserve
| currency, from Bitcoin to China RMB. I fear the politicians are
| playing with fire and the lack of fiscal discipline will lead to
| serious backlash and the reduction in global financial power for
| the US.
| websites2023 wrote:
| There is no serious threat the US Dollar as the global reserve
| currency. China is a currency manipulator and is teetering on
| the edge of collapse because of their monetary management.
| Bitcoin is far too unstable and represents a relinquishment of
| government control over monetary policy, which no sane
| government will give up. To put it bluntly, governments would
| rather the US control the world's money supply than to give up
| control to the blockchain, which is poorly understood and far
| too risky to use outside of speculative markets and small scale
| experiments.
| minikites wrote:
| >The tragedy is that the better projects were never on the agenda
| of power at all. The tragedy is that the one thing that those
| with power and influence could agree on was war-fighting.
|
| There's not much more I can add to this. Society is made up of
| choices and we chose to slaughter people around the world instead
| of choosing to provide healthcare, education, or any other
| constructive benefit.
| titzer wrote:
| Generations of mal-investment.
| 3009629147 wrote:
| Who is "we"? Afaik the U.S. military power structure is based
| on soldiers obeying orders they receive from their superior.
| ndnxmsm wrote:
| Who is _we_?
| adventured wrote:
| > instead of choosing to provide healthcare, education, or any
| other constructive benefit
|
| The US spends more per capita on healthcare and education than
| any other nation, by far. The US didn't choose not to provide
| healthcare or education.
|
| If you wanted to solve the healthcare equation in the US, you
| wouldn't need to spend an additional dime. Just bring US
| healthcare costs into alignment with Britain's NHS and the
| bottom ~45% of the country would be covered by Medicaid's
| existing outlays. Spending trillions more on healthcare would
| be the dumbest thing we could do, next to invading Iraq. We
| need to smash costs downward and spread healthcare wide, not
| continue the cost inflation spiral; you rationally do that
| without spending more than we already are. The same goes for
| education, the last thing we need is to spend more on
| education, we need to actually start getting a good return on
| our outrageous education spending, and push cost out of the
| system simultaneously.
|
| > Society is made up of choices and we chose to slaughter
| people around the world
|
| It's certainly true the US should have never invaded Iraq and
| should not have stayed in Afghanistan so long.
|
| Slaughter people? Bull.
|
| The US overwhelmingly did the opposite of slaughtering people.
| It lost trillions of dollars and thousands of soldiers trying
| to keep people from slaughtering each other, trying to prop up
| central governments (which has largely succeeded in Iraq). It
| stepped inbetween civil wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
|
| Are you seeing what the Taliban are doing right now? That's one
| group of Afghanis trying to kill/enslave/conquer the rest.
| Regional warlords are already right back to fighting for
| territorial gains. That was going on before the US invaded.
| It'll be going on in another 50 years too. The US neither
| created the Taliban (despite what propaganda to the contrary
| claims) nor caused the civil war in Afghanistan; the US did
| step into the ongoing Afghanistan civil war, assisting the
| Northern Alliance at first and then fully invading second to
| prop up a new central government.
|
| Do you know why so many people are fleeing from the Taliban and
| seeking escape with the US at the airport? Specifically because
| it was the US that was not trying to slaughter people in
| Afghanistan. The Taliban are the slaughtering group the US was
| trying to get rid of. If the US were the slaughtering faction,
| people would be running in terror from the US instead of
| seeking safety with the US. If the US were the slaughtering
| faction, those thousands of Afghani refugees landing at Dulles
| in Virginia would be getting executed at the airport on
| arrival.
|
| The civil war in Iraq was directly caused by the US
| overthrowing Saddam Hussein, and that civil war was inevitable
| regardless of US involvement. That internal religious conflict
| has very long tentacles in history, going back many hundreds of
| years.
|
| Most of those deaths listed on that page are directly from
| internal warring factions within the nations, killing each
| other in civil war. Not from the US "slaughtering" people.
| Those conflicts existed before the US and they will exist after
| the US. Which, again, is also not an argument for the US
| invading Iraq and doesn't excuse the stupidity of the US
| invading. There was no scenario where Saddam was going to be
| displaced and Iraq wasn't going to fall into a civil war,
| especially given the minority oppressor vs majority oppressed
| conflict that Saddam's power represented. Iraq wasn't stable
| before the US invaded, it was a disaster of instability,
| genocide and terror, which is why Saddam had to constantly
| purge and murder people to retain power. When you have
| stability, you don't have to do that. The US released a hyper
| oppressed majority population in Iraq, it's no wonder there
| were violent consequences to that; those consequences were
| always unavoidable, no matter how Saddam was removed. What's
| the counter premise? Saddam should have stayed in power
| forever, or that Saddam was going to be peacefully removed from
| power and it was going to be a lovefest? It's an ignorant
| fantasy.
|
| The US had a moral right to step in and help the Iraqi people,
| who were under occupation by Saddam's dictatorship (especially
| true of the majority Shia), every bit as much as it had a moral
| right to step in and help the French people cast off the Nazis.
| The US had a moral right to help the people of Afghanistan
| depose the Taliban, every bit as much as the US had a moral
| right to help nations in Eastern Europe cast off the shackles
| of the USSR. The Soviets were no better than the Taliban
| ideologically. The people of Europe are no more worthy of help
| than the people of Iraq or Afghanistan. Which also doesn't mean
| it was in the US self-interest to get involved in either Iraq
| or Afghanistan.
| hash872 wrote:
| The United States spends _more_ on healthcare _just for the
| elderly_ as it does its entire, famous military budget. The
| spends 70% more on Medicare & Medicaid combined, than the
| entire military budget. It spends more than three times as much
| on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid than on the entire
| military budget. If you add in PPP, unemployment, and the
| stimulus checks, you're looking at 4-5x more social spending
| than _entire military budget_. Here, look at the numbers from
| the Congressional Budget Office yourself:
|
| https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57170
| tra3 wrote:
| I'm confused.
|
| > If we want to criticize the War on Terror from a perspective
| that does not betray sensible macroeconomics, we should not rely
| on calculations of cost, or suggestions of crowding out to do the
| work for us. America could easily afford the War on Terror.
|
| How is "crowding out" still not a reasonable argument? Sure, he
| says you can print more money, but then you run against the
| constraints (like inflation) that he talks about earlier in the
| article. So there's a limit to how much can be printed, and does
| that not "crowd out" other potential spending targets?
| omegaworks wrote:
| >Why do progressive critiques of the war fall back on
| conservative versions of economics to underpin an anti-war
| position?
|
| Spending money keeping people alive is a more productive use of
| that money than spending money to make people dead.
|
| MMT doesn't change this equation. In fact, it points out
| explicitly that increased money supply MUST be used to increase
| productivity. The exact opposite of what happens when you spend
| money to bomb people.
| hamburgerwah wrote:
| I'm always amazed at the people that think that somehow if the
| government had not misspent these trillions of dollars on war
| that it could have somehow effectively spent it on massive health
| and education projects. The choice here was for a corrupt
| congress to dole out trillions in directionless war or dole out
| trillions in directionless health and education boondoggles. Also
| these same people seem to be against tax cuts.
|
| I think the federal government needs to cut about 700,000 federal
| jobs and we need to shrink the discretionary federal budget by at
| least 500 billion. If we don't, you will keep getting iraqs and
| afghanistans until we collapse.
| failrate wrote:
| Yes, the fed issues currency by fiat, but the actual resources
| consumed by this war probably account for the monetary price tag.
| Additionally, the money spent did not vanish in a puff of smoke
| at the end of a gun: it lined the war chests of the military
| industrial complex. This gives these people and organizations
| outsized influence to manipulate our government into staying in
| wars in order to justify buying expensive munitions. This
| destructive feedback loop is the true cost of war.
| 3009629147 wrote:
| Please note: most (+-95%) of the U.S. money supply is not
| created by the Federal Reserve, but by the U.S. commercial
| banks as deposits when they make loans. [1] Alternatively you
| can read the Bank of England report on Money creation. [2] It's
| about the British economy but goes into further detail and the
| monetary principles are the same in every modern country.
|
| [1]
| https://www.kreditordnung.info/docs/S_and_P__Repeat_After_Me...
|
| [2] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-
| bulletin/2014/q1/m...
| arodgers_la wrote:
| Which people and which organizations, exactly?
| tcoff91 wrote:
| I'm assuming he's referring to companies like Lockheed
| Martin, Raytheon, etc...
| conradev wrote:
| The usual suspects - Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon,
| Northrop Grumman, etc.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_100_Contractors_of_the_U.S.
| ..
| mercy_dude wrote:
| > This gives these people and organizations outsized influence
| to manipulate our government into staying in wars in order to
| justify buying expensive munitions. This destructive feedback
| loop is the true cost of war.
|
| Oh and you forgot the revolving door that exists between the
| military industrial complex and DC power Center. And how they
| influence the policy decisions. Our current defence secy for
| example is a former Rayethonian exec.
| ndnxmsm wrote:
| Any proper left wing position is against war between nations but
| in support of war between _classes_.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-08-23 23:02 UTC)