The Price of Empire

Speaking of the price of the U.S. Empire, we should be aware that what we spend on war goes far beyond what's in the Defense Budget.

Supplemental bills, for example, are often passed that allow spending beyond what was initially appropriated. Since October 7, 2023, for example, the U.S, has passed legislation for $12.5 billion in "emergency aid" to Israel for its military offensive in Gaza -- an offensive, we should not forget, that has been determined to be a genocide by the International Criminal Court, and called an act of "ethnic cleansing" by one of Israel's own former defense ministers.

More importantly, there are enormous  war expenses outside the Defense budget:

For instance, the price of caring for post-9/11 war vets "will reach between $2.2 and $2.5 trillion by 2050 — most of which has not yet been paid." Yes, that's 2.5 trillion, or a billion multiplied by 250, 000.

Another big price is hidden in the Department of Energy. There,  roughly $ 20 billion annually goes for weapons development.

The debt service on U.S. wars must also be considered. According to the Cost of War Project, the U.S.'s wars since 2001 have been financed "almost entirely by borrowing." The interest along on these war loans "could total over 6.5 trillion by the 2050s ." 

Finally, much of the work of the Department of Homeland Security relates to the war industry. Its annual budget is $60.4 billion.

But what if ...

Numbers are well-named, as they can indeed be numbing. And economists seem to be able to produce numbers that tell you whatever they want. So take the following for what you think it's worth. 

The Cost of War Project conducted a study on jobs gained and lost by the so-called "War on Terror" from 2001 - 2016. You can read the entire study here: 

 https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2017/Job%20Opportunity%20Cost%20of%20War%20-%20HGP%20-%20FINAL.pdf

What the study mainly concluded was that while defense spending of course creates jobs:

" Education and healthcare create more than twice as many jobs as defense for the same level of spending, while clean energy and infrastructure create over 40 percent more jobs. In fact, over the past 16 years, by spending money on war rather than in these other areas of the domestic economy, the US lost the opportunity to create between one million and three million additional jobs."