I was wondering this when I debated war with my brother who said, that at least war and tax money going to the us army is not wasted, since war is profitable.
But how is war profitable? The Iraq war cost 5 trillion dollars, which is more money than exists in the entire world. And the US military has an annual budget of 500 Billion, which is about switzerlands GPD.
So how can you possibly recuperate that much money? Because that is more money than oil could possibly be worth.
So how does the US military make its money back?
In: Economics
Well war and “tax money going to the US army” are two different things. u/JudgeHoltman makes a good case for why military spending can be a net positive for a nation. Intuitively, there must be *some* positive level of military spending that is good, or else no country would bother spending their money on a military. It would, however, be a classic fallacy to assume that just because the last dollar was worthwhile, the next one will be too. Eventually military spending becomes wasteful, though there’s a lot of debate about where that line is.
War is a different beast and is basically never profitable to people except military contractors. One could even say that military spending is worthwhile primarily *because* it helps to avoid wars, or at least minimize their impact on citizens when they do happen. War is destructive. There’s money to be made in rebuilding what you destroyed, but the most efficient approach was to just not destroy the stuff in the first place. This extends to people as much as it does to buildings and equipment. Some of the “economic miracles” that followed the 20th century wars were brought on by the opportunity to re-orient institutions, but a lot of it arose from the simple fact that there was now a lot of work to be done by a smaller number of people, so those people were able to collect high wages at stable jobs. To really asses whether war was “worth it”, you’d have to put yourself in the shoes of a random citizen before the war even began. There’s some chance you live to enjoy the economic miracle, but maybe you don’t.
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