SUMMARY
Over 940,000 people have died in the post-9/11 wars due to direct war violence.
An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people have died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.
Over 432,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the fighting.
38 million — the number of war refugees and displaced persons.
The U.S. federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $8 trillion.
The U.S. government is conducting counterterror activities in 85 countries.
At least four times as many active duty personnel and war veterans of post-9/11 conflicts have died of suicide than in combat.
The wars have been accompanied by violations of human rights and civil liberties, in the U.S. and abroad.
In addition to direct costs, there are the opportunity costs of these terrible wars. Since 2001 we Americans allowed US manufacturing to be hollowed out, failed to solve immigration, stood idly by as wealth accumulated in the hands of an ever smaller percentage of our citizens, watched drug deaths climb over 100K per annum, ...
If this is what victory looks like, I would hate to see defeat.
This is, perhaps, a consequence of countries like China choosing to subsidize their manufacturing sectors at the expense of domestic demand. China subsidizes, producing cheaper goods, which are gobbled up by the west, leaving China w/ excess dollars that it then needs to park in US Treasuries, depressing lending rates and making it cheaper for the USG to run deficits. https://twitter.com/michaelxpettis is a big proponent of this sort of reasoning.
Can we stop this non-sense? China cannot subsidize industries out of thin air, especially that they came off as a poor country. What China did is they kept their wages lower to "expand" or as we say in Tech "scale". It certainly didn't pay you to get their products and that would not be possible especially at China's scale.
> China cannot subsidize industries out of thin air
Correct. Their industrial subsidies come at the expense of China's domestic spending ability. Many pundits, including the one I linked, believe that China must allow increased domestic demand but this is politically unfavorable in China due to the entrenched interests and beliefs in the necessity of a strong industrial base.
How is this different than saying every investment is a subsidy? China's future domestic spending capability is obviously expanding as it invests in industrial capability.
Thanks to compounding, if they have consistently spent half as much as "they should" elsewhere for decades, there is some moment where they will reach more absolute domestic spending without ever raising that rate to where it "should" be.
I don't know, if you're interested I'd read more from the guy I pointed out above.
Off the top of my head, I'll say that China is making a trade-off to subsidize manufacturing at the expense of wages. This can take the form of 'malinvestment' or misallocation of capital(see the ghost cities, trains to nowhere, "Belt and Road" malinvestment, etc) which boost manufacturing in the short term while leaving little benefits in the long term. It also leaves China with weak domestic consumption so more of the GDP growth must be derived from manufacturing in order to meet CCP growth targets.
Further, the subsidies come at the expense of efficiency. For instance, China leads the world in cotton subsidies despite having 4x competing countries' costs to grow cotton. These subsidies do not necessarily translate into some future benefit for Chinese citizens.
Lol you can’t blame China for doing business with US corporations. It was many two way transactions
The US makes different to subsidy or protection choices with their own effects. selective agriculture is subsidized and insured while things like Trucks are protected - inflating the size, pollution footprint, and selection of vehicles in the US.
We also have an indirect manufacturing & tech subsidy through military spending. Not super efficient at developing our economy but not a small effect either.
I support where the US is rethinking the balance of subsidy and protection on computer chips but wish some of the existing ossified decisions were revisited or rebalanced.
It's not that I'm blaming China as much as I'm trying to explain the mechanics. Of course US consumers and corporations chose to take the path of immediate gratification, leading to the hollowing out of the American working class and mfg base. But it also led to decades of low inflation, a soaring bond market, and increased standard of living for Americans overall(even though some classes, like blue collar workers(particularly men) suffered).
How I'm reading your comment in the context of the topic is that if the US hadn't been involved in a costly war effort, they could have perhaps countered the moves China made by allocating trillions to support their own industry. They might not have, but at least it would have been possible without the war.
I don't fully understand all the dynamics, but you run into the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma if you want to be the world's reserve currency while simultaneously possessing a competitive manufacturing and exporting sector. So even if the US hadn't been involved in the war, its industry would have been hamstrung and unable to compete effectively due to a strong dollar.
It's time we stop the war machine --both parties are in on it. It won't stop violence, but it'll be on their terms and if they want to destroy themselves, why should we get in their way?
Some of the violence is directly done by us, some encouraged by us and some of it is natively fomented --I don't care. Bring us all back home and let the world duke it out for themselves.
Imagine what we could have done for ourselves with $8T dollars (child development, motherhood, infrastructure, education)! No, instead we piss it on wars.
Damned Neocons.
We don't need to be the world's "daddy". Countries have to figure things out for themselves. It's like trying to tell a kid how to grow up based on one's own experience. It doesn't work, kids have to figure things out for themselves.
If one country wants to have a violent theocratic dictatorship and another a violent communist dictatorship, and another just thinks we're pigs, you know what: let them work it out. Maybe it takes 100 years. Let them write their own history.
How has that worked out so far? A legacy of ashes as the CIA book goes. US foreign intervetionist policy of the last 20 years has been nothing but one colossal disaster after another.
Yes!!! As a wealthy progressive who votes blue no matter who I too support the military industrial complex and think not being russia should be the only requirement to join NATO.
Yes. They were not an ally until after the war started. You don't get to say "nah we don't need you" and then rely on billions of dollars after the fact, and then join the pact and reap the official benefits once the going gets bad.
Maybe you forgot the little detail where Ukraine gave up 1700 nuclear bombs on a promise from Russia and the United States that they have nothing to worry about. Russia wiped their ass with that promise, should we do the same?
That revolution was tainted by outside interests influencing the outcome --one of the influencers was Russia, but there also was another one -one which eventually tried to smooth things over with an "overload". Kind of like when China or USSR piss in LatAm, we kind of get irked.
" It's time we stop the war machine --both parties are in on it. It won't stop violence, but it'll be on their terms and if they want to destroy themselves, why should we get in their way?"
What happens when you tell people this and suggest we stop sending arms and munitions to Ukraine?
It was in the MIC and security states' best interests, made popular by taking advantage of a tragedy and wielding propaganda. Honestly, GG to the people running the show at the time. It was a very clever play. Have to give credit where credit's due. We willingly surrendered so many rights.
We literally have all of history as an example of how bad Afghanistan invasions go for the invader. One prime example being the Soviet Union utterly failing just ~two decades prior.
Certainly not every intervention was a great idea, no, but that doesn't mean the right thing to do is never intervene. I'd argue the right thing to do is learn from that and not do that again.
So what interventions after WW2 do you support?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
The intervention in the Korean war?
The intervention in the Vietnam war?
Intervening in the Laotian Civil War?
The Permesta Rebellion?
Lebanon crisis? Bay of Pigs?
Invading Panama? Invading Grenada?
It provides the US military with invaluable combat experience and allows it to test/improve its strategies, equipment, and intelligence capabilities.
(Of course, fighting wars so one can remain combat-ready is the very definition of treating other people as means to an end rather than as ends in themselves, and so very much offends against the moral sensibility. But the question here is about self-interest.)
Because America recognizes the benefit in addition to bearing the cost.
Like the federal debt, we always look at only half the balance sheet to maximize sensationalism.
[edit] with this type of geopolitical posturing especially, it's very difficult to calculate the benefits of everything that didn't happen as a result of your intervention, so it's especially easy to ignore. Just like investing in unit testing. How many incidents didn't happen because of the tests you wrote - and how much did that save the company? The set is probably uncountable, but we do generally accept that it's greater than zero.
Okay but you can make the same argument in reverse that the potential uncountable benefits aren't likely to be great enough for it to be acceptable to you. And many of us have come to that conclusion.
Because we have the capacity and values to do so. In the end, doing nothing now will cost more in the long run.
If America wants to be great again, it will do so through leadership, not through self-centered isolationism. Should a gap be created, the likes of Russia and China will fill it. Is that the world leadership you want?
As I've aged I've transformed from a Ron Paul libertarian to more of a "Strong America" moderate liberal.
It's very seductive to believe that the world is a nice place and none of its issues will ever show up at our doorstep if we just leave the rest of the world alone. But sadly the world will always have strong powers and they will set the rules. I'd rather be on the winning team. If someone is going to be the world police/power-broker I want it to be us.
That's not to say we are perfect or don't need to improve. The US is deeply flawed and has caused a lot of trouble over the last century. But I'd rather be in the position we're in now vs having Russia or China be the power-broker with an even greater list of failures and abuses.
> The U.S. federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $8 trillion.
Probably explains a lot of the inflation we have seen recently. Gotta pay for it somehow, one way is to make each dollar worth less. It's a stealth tax increase.
The majority contributor to inflation we’ve seen recently is a profit margin increases by corporations in poorly competitive markets. Decades of weak anti trust enforcement coming to roost
We had that forever. The only real trigger is the pandemic stimulus, both the PPP “loans” and the stimulus handed out to normal people. That lit the fuse.
You can literally hear the discussion at public company quarterly calls. Companies are praising the success of raising prices to inflate profit margins.
Every business will price their services to the maximum profit point that the market will bear. This is always the case in a capitalistic society.
What changed with the "free" money handouts is that the price point that market can bear increased resulting in higher profit margins than before. Supply limitations and shortages played a part as well as increased cash and hence demand from people.
As this excess savings and money dries out, the equilibrium price point will move the profit margins back to long term averages although it is a slow process.
Somehow the blow back against the Russian people for the war crimes Putin is committing seems way out of proportion if you compare it with the non existing blow back the US suffered.
There was no boycott of US products or banning of US athletes. In fact the US itself "boycotted" the use of the word "French fryes" (in certain government buildings) because the French didn't want to play along renaming them to "freedom fryes".
Of course not, but that's not what this is about. It's an answer to your comment, because you wrote "It's because the Russian people support what Putin is doing.". But if that was true, wouldn't the US would have been boycotted, as well? But it didn't happen
Nothing would see me happier than to wake up one morning and read that Putin is swinging from a gallows somewhere but I would take any polls of the Russian population with a grain of salt given the history of people being jailed, disappeared, and/or assassinated for speaking out against his regime.
> It's because the Russian people support what Putin is doing.
How could you possibly know that this is the reason?
What is it about these topics that cause people to think this way? Imagine the mess we'd have if we wrote software using this quality/form of logic, it might be as big of a mess as the political world.
