The US wasted trillions on warfare period -- they could have just not spent it, and either not run up the debt or left that money in private hands.
George W Bush had exceptionally terrible taste when it came to his cabinet.
Most of the money CIRCULATES in a country. So it's not like it's one shot and done. The money was paid to some people who then spent it back into the economy and it went round and round. So at most we diverted a certain number of hops of a huge amount of money to a thing.
I look at money as sort of wheels with cogs turning at a certain speed. When you launch some new project, it might pick up momentum by having other cogs spin it up. It can even "grow" in market cap depending on whether increased demand for it drives up the prices for it. But that price can also drop to zero later, as new things come out, eliminating vast swaths of "wealth" in a stock or cryptocurrency or whatever.
So back to my question... money isn't just a one-time resource that a country can spend and can never get back. However, from the point of view of a government, they only get so much revenue per year, so it should be said about the US government and not the country as a whole. The government taxes and diverts money to things that individuals would not do on their own. Fiat currencies allow further powers to print money — before WW2 pundits thought that military activities on such scale were simply not possible to be funded with taxes etc.
Everywhere in the world I go, I see the vast majority of people are regular folks who just want to put food on the table and laugh with their family. It’s the governments and media that whips up all this warfare and propaganda and we wind up paying for it, and people on the other side of the world wind up dying as a result. That’s what the tragedy is. The money paid to eg Blackwater mercenaries or the rest of the military industrial complex probably found its way back to the US economy in short order.
Taxation is normally for taking money from the rich and spending on the poor. In this case however, money was taken from the middle and lower working classes, and given to the rich stock owners. And the country got nothing in return, not bridges, trains, or roads.
If you give rich people tax breaks and they spend it purchasing and bubbling real estate, your gdp might show good numbers, but money is just circulating among the rich.
My point is that the money keeps circulating. Isn’t it short sighted the other way, to act as if it disappeared?
Circulating among rich or poor is a different question - of outsorcing, automation, demand for human labor and services, UBI and so on - rather than spending it on the armed forces. Poor people get paid in the armed forces and go spend that money into the economy too. It’s apples and oranges. I’m saying the tragedy is the bombing and destruction, the money found its way back into the economy.
American defense spending spends lesser on the poor, and the country does not even get bridges or trains in return.
"In 2014, the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers (those with AGIs below $38,173) earned 11.27 percent of total AGI. This group of taxpayers paid approximately $38 billion in taxes, or 2.75 percent of all income taxes in 2014.
In contrast, the top 1 percent of all taxpayers (taxpayers with AGIs of $465,626 and above) earned 20.58 percent of all AGI in 2014, but paid 39.48 percent of all federal income taxes.
In 2014, the top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined. The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid $543 billion, or 39.48 percent of all income taxes, while the bottom 90 percent paid $400 billion, or 29.12 percent of all income taxes." [0]
[0]: https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-...
If the federal budget came from federal taxes, it would be necessarily constrained to them and deficits would be impossible.