It's so funny to me when the dollars stop being abstract for a moment, and I see that the US has regions that beg for quite literally .2% of this amount to fund things like public transit, lead remediation in elementary schools, or homelessness programs.
Americans will never see a dime of benefit from this war.
Call me crazy, but maybe allowing privatization of public transportation, security, healthcare, etc is where this all started. The incentives need to stop.
Not only aid, it was a powerful tool for the extension of American soft power around the globe. But I guess we're no longer able to reason in the abstract beyond "helping people is woke."
But yes our politicians seem entirely unwilling to do anything about colossal expenditures on this "expedition", while all-too-willingly destroying American institutions. It's an insurrection of the elites; Federalist Society finally getting the destruction of the nation their treasonous tattered souls have lusted for. What a horror show they have us strapped in to.
For reference, a national 4-week paid parental leave program in the U.S. is estimated to cost under $2 billion annually, while a 12-week program would cost around $7 billion.
Note that it doesn't count the cost of second- or third- order effects (like the cost from the price of oil going up by 50%). Since February 28, crude oil prices increases cost $42 billion in the United States alone.
Being a net exporter is completely irrelevant when prices are set globally. Such a statement is like shining a laser pointer to distract a cat, fun, but meaningless.
That means they're passing the cost onto the whole world. The US is making this war everyone else's problem and it's ruining foreign affairs and good standing with the world.
I think people are more concerned about the massive deindustrialization and famines which could result from the Strait of Hormuz being chaotically strangled, not the hit to their pocket books at the gas pump
It is nice to be rich. People in India and Asia are heavily reliant upon oil and gas coming through the strait. When prices shoot up by a multiple, guess what happens? The poorest people have to do without cooking gas. “Rationing” is a cute word to mean the poor take the hit on the chin.
There is enormous, real suffering hitting those who can least handle it.
Edit: I would add that those in the renewables industry are absolutely making lemonade off the situation. Energy analysts agree that short term profits will go up, but long term, everyone is going to be running to renewables. No country wants to have this existential fuel disruption risk hanging over their heads.
Is the job of a leader (or the administration) to foresee threats before anyone else can see it coming? Is their job to make sure that it does not manifest?
It is interesting that when they does it, the majority is against it, precisely because no one else could see it and can agree with the action of the administration?
So it seems that if someone is a very good leader, they will be ridiculed by the very people they are trying to protect. I think this happens if the unit in question is a family, or a country.
I am not picking sides in the on going crisis. But just making an observation.
- Many don't understand that stewardship of nuclear weapons alone is a major undertaking that Iran cannot be trusted to manage. US & USSR alone has several near-miss detonations/launches.
- Many will refuse to accept solely because 'orange man bad'.
- Some are paid to criticize on influential online forums and HN makes no effort to moderate or police such activity.
The ballistic missiles are the danger, and Iran already has those. There is no missile or reentry vehicle in Iran's possession that can credibly threaten the United States with a nuclear weapon.
> US & USSR alone has several near-miss detonations/launches.
According to Seymour Hersh, Israel was close to using their nuclear weapon as well. Why not focus on their disarmament first to deter Iranian retaliation?
> Some are paid to criticize on influential online forums and HN makes no effort to moderate or police such activity.
Peace in that region of the world, since you can't just bomb Iran consequence free anymore?
MAD has had its virtues extolled, yet assume it won't work with another country because somehow they are even more irrational (if true). Even though that is exactly for whom the MAD strategy is designed and operates under.
It is only the build up of Iran getting a nuclear weapon that is used to go to war.
The game theory here seems rather simple, honestly.
And if Iran is seen as hostile, we need to look at the countries for whom the USA allies with and what wars they launched in the region. And they are plausible nuclear capable where their neighbors are not.
I think Israel is currently a larger aggressor, literally flattening more towns through demolition.
Oh wait, that the Trump and his war criminal friends. They make the problem, blame it on someone else, and then claim they fixed it while making life worse for everyone else. Meanwhile Trump and his corrupt oligarch cronies are profiting massively.
This superficial analogy comes up a lot but these two states don't share anything in common aside from internal repression. They're diametrically opposed in their external behavior.
Look at a small sampling of Iran's external actions in the region through the Quds force. The hundreds of thousands of Syrians killed by Hezbollah or the almost 300k dead in Yemen due to the Houthis. Iran's actions in 2019-2022 against CENTCOM bases in Iraq and elsewhere. The puppet Iraqi president propped up by PMF.
North Korea doesn't do anything like this until very recently when they started sending troops to invade Ukraine. They don't organize their state around an expansionist death cult ideology.
NK doesn't behave different due to owning a nuclear weapon. Before the 1990s they were like this too.
North Korea routinely attacks South Korean and US assets in its area like the sinking of Cheonan. North Korea is strongly allied with its other neighbors China and Russia.
Iran is not organized around an expansionist death cult. They have not expanded or attempted to expand at all. They are involved in lots of neighboring conflicts because they are in a region with lots of conflicts. We are also involved in lots of conflicts there.
There is no possible closer comparison for a nuclear Iran than nuclear North Korea.
It's so despicable and dishonest what you're doing equating NK's support for nation states to Iran's support for Quds proxies that receive thousands of missiles and rockets directly from Iran, hijack the sovereignty of the countries they're inside of, worship the Iranian leader as a pope-like figure, assassinate rivals domestically and kill hundreds of thousands of people. Liar.
It's despicable and dishonest to pretend they're different in a relevant way. You can hate Iran till your dying breath, but it has no bearing on the economic question.
the right question to ask is how much worse is the situation now that tensions have been radically escalated without any meaningful path towards Iranian disarmament.
(which of course would need to account for the cost to the end user of constant rug-pulling, enshitification, github struggling to maintain one 9 of availability, privacy invasion, rampant mental health issues and political division from profit-based social media, etc)
The data center money was private capital put up by individuals and corporations willingly. They are seeking to provide a product (compute) to paying consumers.
You can have an opinion on whether or not AI/data centers are worthwhile, but ultimately it wasn't made by your money.
Yea, it is funny in /r/worldnews. Everytime Trump says something, there will be a thousand comments describing why everyone should ignore everything he says..
> > Trump’s budget proposal represents the largest yearly military spending plan in U.S. history, exceeding the previous record of $1.2 trillion during World War II, when adjusted for inflation. And records confirm the DNC’s characterization of the increase being the largest since WWII when inflation is factored in.
Privatize the gains, socialize the losses. I miss actual capitalism with actual competition and anti-trust enforcement, not the oligopolies, regulatory capture and government-picked survivors we have now.
That request was over a month ago and perhaps based on estimates using an operation tempo that was high. After the initial outburst, things may have slowed down.
That said, a lot of missiles were used, which, under current production rates, will take years to replenish: some 'extra' money may be needed to pay for production ramp up to get replacements sooner.
> based on estimates using an operation tempo that was high
So they were expecting those high tempos to continue for months?
> That said, a lot of missiles were used, which, under current production rates, will take years to replenish: some 'extra' money may be needed to pay for production ramp up to get replacements sooner.
For any sufficiently large and complex system, you need to keep that assembly line alive to keep the system alive. Part of this is for just replacement parts and general maintenance. Take something like the F35. The engine will only last a certain number of flight hours. Then you need a new engine. That engine will need replacement blades and other parts. The frame and the stealth coating will need maintenance. And then there are all the weapons you fit to the plane and use.
A good example of how this matters is with rockets. Up until SLS, Saturn V was the most powerful rocket ever built and SLS only beats it by "cheating" with 2 solid rocket boosters. People would often ask "if we could build Saturn V 50-60 eyars ago, why can't we just do that again?" It's a fair question and the answer is we no longer have the expertise. All of the people who worked on that are long gone. Some of it was documented. Some wasn't. F5 engines were essentially bespoke. Materials science has changed. It's essentially impossible or just prohibitively impossible to reproduce now.
So back to the $200 billion. The US military has been hit by this kind of problem before where they've bought a weapons system and been unable to maintain it later. Now it essentially has to be documented and the US buys up and stores all the documentation as well as machining tools, etc if they ever have to revive it.
So for a lot of the munitions used in the war, the US has contracted them to a certain replacement rate. In the last year they've been used way in excess of that production rate. Ramping up production is expensive. New factories have to be built. New people need to be trained. And the only way a supplier would do that is if the military essentially pays for it AND guarantees purchasing. So you might end up paying 3x to double production because it doesn't necessarily scale. It's also more expensive to scale something up quickly.
Put another way, this is another $200 billion for Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to replenish overpriced weapon systems.
This makes absolutely no sense. The $25 Billion cost would be the cost of all the munitions used, the cost of the actual usage, the cost of all the maintenance, the fuel consumption, the logistics, the wages and hazard pay of all the people involved. So the things you actually need to replace are only a tiny fraction of that number. On top of that, it's still the total. If you were spending $2.5 billion per year for 10 years to build up that stockpile, then $25 billion is already a 10X multiplier to scale back rapidly, on top of the $2.5 billion per year that has already been allocated for the usual production. Further, those are peace time prices. Munitions factories are overbuilt and then run lean during peacetime, increasing per unit cost to justify maintaining everything. Scaling up to larger orders doesn't increase unit prices, it lowers them. There may be some diseconomies of scale as you deal with some growing pains or if you need to go beyond maximum capacity, but it's certainly nothing that's going to balloon the cost 8X+. Finally, building the facilities to produce more quickly would take substantial time anyways, so it's not even advantageous to do so unless you're actually going to need that higher production capacity in the long term.
Right now the munitions cost is estimated at $10 Billion with a replacement time of 1-4 years. Note that only a fraction of the US's inventory was actually used, for example the US used about 1000 tomahawks over the course of the conflict and still has about 2000 in inventory. Obviously every munition you fire is one less round available immediately - if we get into a war with China next week we'll be in a bad spot - but that's not a problem solvable by overspending.
One time $10k per borrower forgiveness was estimated to cost $300 to $330 billion.
Of course this cost would be distributed over time, and the economic benefits of putting substantial spending money in the pockets of younger adults would have the potential to significantly offset or exceed these costs.
Total student loans are about $1.8 trillion. SCOTUS blocked forgiveness on $400 billion of that.
Trump-led tax cut policies reduced revenues by ~$1.5 trillion in his first term, and ~$5 trillion in his second term. $800B of PPP loans were forgiven. The oft-cited ICE and CBP budget increases were about $140 billion.
I can't find many other policies championed by Trump that accounted for increases >$200B in increased spending. As a result, there's not really any good 1:1 "Trump is willing to spend $400B on $X but not student loans". Most of his national debt impact has been via tax cuts rather than spending. Where spending did increase in large amounts, it was mostly for the Pentagon, and some % of those increases likely would have occurred under any other administration - so it's hard for me to carve out what Pentagon budget increases were due to his policies vs. the base-case for how much they would have increased otherwise.
I’d be okay with them forgiving student loans so long as they also pay me back for what I paid back.
I think the best course is to allow students to default on their loans. With backed loans Unis know they’ll get their money one way or the other and keep ballooning their admin costs.
Why does improving things for future generations need to be held up until we can undo mistakes already done? The ladder got pulled up and some of us needed to scramble, but can't we lower the ladder back down for them anyway?
We can do both. We can help people already saddled with debt, and also do things to prevent future generations from being saddled with debt in the first place. People who managed to climb out of the hole (a demographic I am also part of) are the least in need of consideration.
If you want to keep Unis honest, why not make them all public and financially regulated? Seems like the free market incentives should be removed from this essential service...
Because we're still alive and also have a future and if the goal is to help people, there is no reason to draw the line at "paid it off already" when money is fungible and can still be used to secure a more comfortable future. Having paid off debts doesn't mean you climbed out of the hole, it means you did the responsible thing when you could have easily stashed the money away for your own retirement.
I'm not saying we shouldn't help people like us, who already paid off large sums of loans. I'm asking why we should only help people still saddled with debt if we also help people like us at the same time. That's classic crab mentality.
> it means you did the responsible thing
Not all fields are lucrative enough that paying off a pile of loans is even feasible. With how college is often pushes as all but required for many kids, it isn't possible to make an informed decision.
For comparison, Iran's annual military budget is somewhere between $7B and $11B [1], representing 2-2.5% of estimated GDP. The US military budget currently exceeds $1T+ and the ask for 2026 is expected to be $1.5T+, representing almost 5% of GDP. And the US simply cannot end this conflict militarily short of the use of nuclear weapons. I don't mean that as hyperbole. I mean it literally.
There are long-term consequences to this war (and the 12 day war last year), namely the depletion of missile defence munitions (eg Patriot, THAAD) that will take years to replenish and this will have ripple effects on allies as well as certain theaters (eg moving THAAD interceptors and radars from South Korea to the Gulf).
Over half of the military budget goes towards weapon systems, arguably incredibly overpriced weapon systems. Put another way, it's a scam to move money from government coffers to private weapons manufacturers.
The inability to open the Strait of Hormuz militarily was not a surprise to US military leadership or intelligence agencies. It was only a surprise to the president (IMHO) who believed he could do a repeat of a Venezuelan decapitation strike. But Iran unlike Venezuela has suffered under reprehensible and unjustifiable sanctions and military adventurism by the US and its proxies such that the entire Iranian national project is built to resist US aggression, understandably. So that was never going to work.
This will have to end diplomatically. It will be worse for the US than it was before this war. Iran has something better than a nuke: it has a nuke they can use (e closing the Strait) and the US forced them to use it and prove that it works.
Now it's just a questio9n of how long this impassse goes on for before it ends and so far at least the US would rather let the world burn than split with Israel. Again without hyperbole I say, splitting with Israel effectively means the end of American empire. And the whole world is suffering for it.
- $9b per month increase in US oil export revenue as a result offsets probably 40% of the cost.
- Several trillion (with a 'T") of realized and yet to be realized FDI commitments from gulf states more than offsets cost by about 3x.
- A nuclear Iran carries economic costs I won't detail here to prevent a wall of text. In sum, forces other countries to go nuclear and take other actions to manage risk, and this happens in ways that could severely impact US dollar standing, US debt standing and US military spending. Its an interconnected world.
I know its unpopular to be pro-USA and pro-government on HN, but someone has to be the voice of reason - even if its at the bottom of the page.
A problem with your "voice of reason" is the assumption that it will prevent nukes in Iran or the region. The US people have just offered an object lesson in why deterrent weapons are useful. How capricious they are in diplomacy. And how willing Americans are to withdraw boots on the ground in allied countries. Of course most of that won't be surprising to Iranians.
By the way, this is just the estimate from Pete Hegseth, who has demonstrated himself to be an unreliable narrator. This administration seems to have difficulty with numbers in general, accurate numbers in particular. The real cost is likely twice this, or higher.
For example, roughly 50% of our missile stockpiles have been depleted during this "excursion."
All of the jokes about reported Soviet production numbers come to mind. This administration has zero credibility in speaking the truth, especially when the outcome is embarrassing.
They had an agreement that was working which Trump tore up and then went to war on Israel’s behalf. So it was largely a solved problem until Trump created the problem.
"Foreigners like me care more about global stability" yes so continue to rain bombs on the middle east, accept their poorest as refugees, and continue to support Israeli expansion. All of this leads to global stability. It's definitely not the reason behind global instability.
European takes are usually the funniest. It's literal racism (as in, one race is better than the other) but it's packaged in such a ridiculous way that you somehow suggest that it's doing others a favor.
I remember before the election I read a few people on HN say Trump is the most anti-war president they have ever seen and that all the talk about him letting Israel flatten Palestine was fearmongering. Wonder how they feel now.
I think he ran on ending "forever wars", not whether or not Israel could flatten Palestine. He would probably also argue that Iran is a 47 year forever war that he is finally ending.
He made efforts to end that already by being the first sitting president to meet with them during his first term, so I guess we'll see but Cuba is apparently next in line...
I felt more or less like this, though I don't know if I posted it on HN. Lots of things I didn't like about Trump, but I did favour the less interventionist foreign policy he promised and initially delivered.
Now I feel I was wrong and Trump is just averagely warmongering, as US presidents go.
Trump kidnaps a sitting president of a foreign nation after months of conducting strikes in the Caribbean. This is not a war but calling him "averagely warmongering" is just wrong.
Which American president did not cause the removal of a sitting leader of a foreign nation from power? Doing it bloodlessly rather than through direct military force or by arming local terrorists absolutely does make you less warmongering than average.
Honest question; why did you believe that about Trump? He was, and is, a serial lier and famously inconsistent. In his first term he moved on the same conflicts he has started now, but was held back circumstances and a cabinet that wasn't 100% yes men. I never understood how anyone could see Trump as the anti-war candidate during the election.
I believed it because he didn't start the same conflicts he started now. More fool me, perhaps, but one person's "held back by circumstances" is another person's "it was all bluster anyway".
It was also consistent with a broader policy of isolationism shown during his first term. Reducing support for NATO, backing out of trade deals - all consistent with America First and not being the world's policeman, which has been the US's justification for every war in the last 80 years.
I'm not American, so probably have a different perspective on this from Americans. But also that's a reason for me to judge a US president disproportionately more on his foreign policy than on say, healthcare or which bathroom people should use.
I muse on this as well but recently I'm struck that the entire conversation is something of a distraction. Everyone is focused on the current administration, what they're doing right or wrong, contrasting it with Biden, etc.
My question is - how did we even reach this point? I understand people didn't like Hillary Clinton and the way they dealt with Biden's age was abysmal when he was in office.
But I have literally never seen anyone express that they wish Clinton had won over Trump back in 2016. I find that really strange.
The only way you could arrive at such a high figure is if you included transfer payments like Social Security and Medicare in "the cost to run the government", which is not how most people understand "the cost to run the government".
Social security and Medicare account for 36% of the Federal budget and are absolutely understood as a cost to run the government. Calling them transfer payments doesn't obviate the fact that they are costs to American taxpayers. Social security and Medicare are also the two Federal outlays that economists fear will bankrupt the United States.
The entire NSF budget, our basic science infrastructure which is currently being destroyed by withholding grant funds against Congress' wishes, is only half of that. And Trump's budget cut it in half, Congress had to push back to avoid throwing away half of a carefully grown research industry.
Meanwhile Trump also wants to increase the daily allocation of military spending by $1.3B per day, to go to useless and unproductive contractors such as his son, rather than truly effective defense spending.
It's so funny to me when the dollars stop being abstract for a moment, and I see that the US has regions that beg for quite literally .2% of this amount to fund things like public transit, lead remediation in elementary schools, or homelessness programs.
Americans will never see a dime of benefit from this war.
Those with shares in certain companies have got very rich out of it.
Call me crazy, but maybe allowing privatization of public transportation, security, healthcare, etc is where this all started. The incentives need to stop.
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For context Doge saved 2-3 billion by independent estimates. And cut some of the most important international aid around the world.
Not only aid, it was a powerful tool for the extension of American soft power around the globe. But I guess we're no longer able to reason in the abstract beyond "helping people is woke."
Other independent estimates say DOGE has cost America $135b. https://fortune.com/article/doge-mass-federal-workforce-cuts...
And spread death and disaster across the world, making chainsaw man musk the 21st century's bloodiest killer. https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
But yes our politicians seem entirely unwilling to do anything about colossal expenditures on this "expedition", while all-too-willingly destroying American institutions. It's an insurrection of the elites; Federalist Society finally getting the destruction of the nation their treasonous tattered souls have lusted for. What a horror show they have us strapped in to.
This is almost certainly a massive underestimate. See the recent Search Engine podcast episode "The Cost of War" with guest Professor Linda Blimes:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1wwjLv4fTtLfHLkk2ejOoF?si=7...
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty/linda-bilmes
For reference, a national 4-week paid parental leave program in the U.S. is estimated to cost under $2 billion annually, while a 12-week program would cost around $7 billion.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w33279
Wow, that's pretty cheap compared to all the AI datacenters.
Note that it doesn't count the cost of second- or third- order effects (like the cost from the price of oil going up by 50%). Since February 28, crude oil prices increases cost $42 billion in the United States alone.
Oil money flows back into the U.S. economy as a net exporter.
Good thing the US economy is Chevron stock value and nothing else.
to be fair US is net exporter now
Doesn’t matter much in this case as US consumerd are still affected by the price rise same way consumers in a non-exporter country would be.
I guess what matters is that the increase in revenue largely stays within the country, but that doesn’t help consumers directly.
net exporter of petroleum products, US is still a net importer of crude.
Being a net exporter is completely irrelevant when prices are set globally. Such a statement is like shining a laser pointer to distract a cat, fun, but meaningless.
You do realize some net exporters subsidize their domestic supply to keep the people happy?
That means they're passing the cost onto the whole world. The US is making this war everyone else's problem and it's ruining foreign affairs and good standing with the world.
Not to mention datacenters were bombed and, for specifically AI ones, the in-construction Stargate was threatened.
We increased export revenue by about $9b per month and may have changed the global energy supply chain to our benefit for decades.
It's so odd to me that people think the cost of oil going up is universally bad. It's good both morally for me and financially for many people.
I think people are more concerned about the massive deindustrialization and famines which could result from the Strait of Hormuz being chaotically strangled, not the hit to their pocket books at the gas pump
The consequences to everyone that isn't as well fed as yourself are also good for you morally?
Nothing keeps the people well feed like the inability to grow crops.
Funny that you say that, because LNG exports from Persian gulf being blocked will result in fertilizer shortages and potentially a famine.
Me too. I'm surprised those in the Green Movements generally, haven't been celebrating. Not a whisper. Makes one wonder.
It is nice to be rich. People in India and Asia are heavily reliant upon oil and gas coming through the strait. When prices shoot up by a multiple, guess what happens? The poorest people have to do without cooking gas. “Rationing” is a cute word to mean the poor take the hit on the chin.
There is enormous, real suffering hitting those who can least handle it.
Edit: I would add that those in the renewables industry are absolutely making lemonade off the situation. Energy analysts agree that short term profits will go up, but long term, everyone is going to be running to renewables. No country wants to have this existential fuel disruption risk hanging over their heads.
What are the second- and third order effects of the Marg Bar Amrika Society getting a nuclear device (and the missiles to deliver it)?
It is interesting.
Is the job of a leader (or the administration) to foresee threats before anyone else can see it coming? Is their job to make sure that it does not manifest?
It is interesting that when they does it, the majority is against it, precisely because no one else could see it and can agree with the action of the administration?
So it seems that if someone is a very good leader, they will be ridiculed by the very people they are trying to protect. I think this happens if the unit in question is a family, or a country.
I am not picking sides in the on going crisis. But just making an observation.
Exactly.
- Many cannot accept its dangerous world.
- Many don't understand that stewardship of nuclear weapons alone is a major undertaking that Iran cannot be trusted to manage. US & USSR alone has several near-miss detonations/launches.
- Many will refuse to accept solely because 'orange man bad'.
- Some are paid to criticize on influential online forums and HN makes no effort to moderate or police such activity.
> Many cannot accept its dangerous world.
The ballistic missiles are the danger, and Iran already has those. There is no missile or reentry vehicle in Iran's possession that can credibly threaten the United States with a nuclear weapon.
> US & USSR alone has several near-miss detonations/launches.
According to Seymour Hersh, Israel was close to using their nuclear weapon as well. Why not focus on their disarmament first to deter Iranian retaliation?
> Some are paid to criticize on influential online forums and HN makes no effort to moderate or police such activity.
Please reread HN's guidelines if you don't want to be permabanned: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Peace in that region of the world, since you can't just bomb Iran consequence free anymore?
MAD has had its virtues extolled, yet assume it won't work with another country because somehow they are even more irrational (if true). Even though that is exactly for whom the MAD strategy is designed and operates under.
It is only the build up of Iran getting a nuclear weapon that is used to go to war.
The game theory here seems rather simple, honestly.
And if Iran is seen as hostile, we need to look at the countries for whom the USA allies with and what wars they launched in the region. And they are plausible nuclear capable where their neighbors are not.
I think Israel is currently a larger aggressor, literally flattening more towns through demolition.
> Peace in that region of the world
...wat? You mean like the peace that Iran exports to the region, and the peace that all those protesters experienced a few months ago?
Who shredded the 2015 agreement with Iran that had stopped them from enriching more uranium?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/29/science/iran-...
Oh wait, that the Trump and his war criminal friends. They make the problem, blame it on someone else, and then claim they fixed it while making life worse for everyone else. Meanwhile Trump and his corrupt oligarch cronies are profiting massively.
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Probably comparable to North Korea getting a nuclear device and the missiles to deliver it.
This superficial analogy comes up a lot but these two states don't share anything in common aside from internal repression. They're diametrically opposed in their external behavior.
Look at a small sampling of Iran's external actions in the region through the Quds force. The hundreds of thousands of Syrians killed by Hezbollah or the almost 300k dead in Yemen due to the Houthis. Iran's actions in 2019-2022 against CENTCOM bases in Iraq and elsewhere. The puppet Iraqi president propped up by PMF.
North Korea doesn't do anything like this until very recently when they started sending troops to invade Ukraine. They don't organize their state around an expansionist death cult ideology.
NK doesn't behave different due to owning a nuclear weapon. Before the 1990s they were like this too.
North Korea routinely attacks South Korean and US assets in its area like the sinking of Cheonan. North Korea is strongly allied with its other neighbors China and Russia.
Iran is not organized around an expansionist death cult. They have not expanded or attempted to expand at all. They are involved in lots of neighboring conflicts because they are in a region with lots of conflicts. We are also involved in lots of conflicts there.
There is no possible closer comparison for a nuclear Iran than nuclear North Korea.
It's so despicable and dishonest what you're doing equating NK's support for nation states to Iran's support for Quds proxies that receive thousands of missiles and rockets directly from Iran, hijack the sovereignty of the countries they're inside of, worship the Iranian leader as a pope-like figure, assassinate rivals domestically and kill hundreds of thousands of people. Liar.
It's despicable and dishonest to pretend they're different in a relevant way. You can hate Iran till your dying breath, but it has no bearing on the economic question.
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Does North Korea send missiles and drones to it's neighbors?
Yes. North Korea has a long history of exporting arms and missile technology to both its neighbors and further afield, including to Iran.
the right question to ask is how much worse is the situation now that tensions have been radically escalated without any meaningful path towards Iranian disarmament.
Compare the costs associated with keeping US troops in NKorea to contain that threat.
The data centers are being paid for by customers, who are receiving greater value from the products than they pay for them.
LMAO would love to see that math
(which of course would need to account for the cost to the end user of constant rug-pulling, enshitification, github struggling to maintain one 9 of availability, privacy invasion, rampant mental health issues and political division from profit-based social media, etc)
Is it? I don't think so.
What was gained from it?
That could be asked of the data centers and the war
The data center money was private capital put up by individuals and corporations willingly. They are seeking to provide a product (compute) to paying consumers.
You can have an opinion on whether or not AI/data centers are worthwhile, but ultimately it wasn't made by your money.
It successfully diverted attention away from the Trump-Epstein Files.
"Mission Accomplished"
If that is the case why do I see this comment every 5 minutes?
Yea, it is funny in /r/worldnews. Everytime Trump says something, there will be a thousand comments describing why everyone should ignore everything he says..
If Ashli Babbitt hadn't listened to Trump, maybe she'd still be alive and enjoying life with her family today.
Does this number include the cost of stockpile replenishment?
Stockpile/equipment costs are the bulk of what we've spent so far.
Operating a carrier group in a theatre is not that much more expensive than just maintaining an operational carrier group.
For many weapon systems, we burned through a decade of inventory in a month. Rapid replenishment will be expensive.
Somewhat related: "Here Is What Trump’s Gargantuan $1.5T Defense Budget Has In It":
* https://www.twz.com/air/here-is-what-trumps-gargantuan-1-5t-...
That's $500B more than last year's budget, and:
> > Trump’s budget proposal represents the largest yearly military spending plan in U.S. history, exceeding the previous record of $1.2 trillion during World War II, when adjusted for inflation. And records confirm the DNC’s characterization of the increase being the largest since WWII when inflation is factored in.
* https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2026/apr/20/democratic...
Destroying the world is cheap compared to the cost to humanity.
Now they need to share the cost that we have burdened the world and ourselves with.
Privatize the gains, socialize the losses. I miss actual capitalism with actual competition and anti-trust enforcement, not the oligopolies, regulatory capture and government-picked survivors we have now.
Too bad the reaction isn’t to correct capitalism rather than to eagerly embrace communist progressivism.
I wonder if they have to assign costs to a project code.
So what were they requesting $200 Billion for?
> So what were they requesting $200 Billion for?
That request was over a month ago and perhaps based on estimates using an operation tempo that was high. After the initial outburst, things may have slowed down.
That said, a lot of missiles were used, which, under current production rates, will take years to replenish: some 'extra' money may be needed to pay for production ramp up to get replacements sooner.
> based on estimates using an operation tempo that was high
So they were expecting those high tempos to continue for months?
> That said, a lot of missiles were used, which, under current production rates, will take years to replenish: some 'extra' money may be needed to pay for production ramp up to get replacements sooner.
8X is a heck of an expedite fee.
Short answer? To ramp up production.
For any sufficiently large and complex system, you need to keep that assembly line alive to keep the system alive. Part of this is for just replacement parts and general maintenance. Take something like the F35. The engine will only last a certain number of flight hours. Then you need a new engine. That engine will need replacement blades and other parts. The frame and the stealth coating will need maintenance. And then there are all the weapons you fit to the plane and use.
A good example of how this matters is with rockets. Up until SLS, Saturn V was the most powerful rocket ever built and SLS only beats it by "cheating" with 2 solid rocket boosters. People would often ask "if we could build Saturn V 50-60 eyars ago, why can't we just do that again?" It's a fair question and the answer is we no longer have the expertise. All of the people who worked on that are long gone. Some of it was documented. Some wasn't. F5 engines were essentially bespoke. Materials science has changed. It's essentially impossible or just prohibitively impossible to reproduce now.
So back to the $200 billion. The US military has been hit by this kind of problem before where they've bought a weapons system and been unable to maintain it later. Now it essentially has to be documented and the US buys up and stores all the documentation as well as machining tools, etc if they ever have to revive it.
So for a lot of the munitions used in the war, the US has contracted them to a certain replacement rate. In the last year they've been used way in excess of that production rate. Ramping up production is expensive. New factories have to be built. New people need to be trained. And the only way a supplier would do that is if the military essentially pays for it AND guarantees purchasing. So you might end up paying 3x to double production because it doesn't necessarily scale. It's also more expensive to scale something up quickly.
Put another way, this is another $200 billion for Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to replenish overpriced weapon systems.
> To ramp up production.
This makes absolutely no sense. The $25 Billion cost would be the cost of all the munitions used, the cost of the actual usage, the cost of all the maintenance, the fuel consumption, the logistics, the wages and hazard pay of all the people involved. So the things you actually need to replace are only a tiny fraction of that number. On top of that, it's still the total. If you were spending $2.5 billion per year for 10 years to build up that stockpile, then $25 billion is already a 10X multiplier to scale back rapidly, on top of the $2.5 billion per year that has already been allocated for the usual production. Further, those are peace time prices. Munitions factories are overbuilt and then run lean during peacetime, increasing per unit cost to justify maintaining everything. Scaling up to larger orders doesn't increase unit prices, it lowers them. There may be some diseconomies of scale as you deal with some growing pains or if you need to go beyond maximum capacity, but it's certainly nothing that's going to balloon the cost 8X+. Finally, building the facilities to produce more quickly would take substantial time anyways, so it's not even advantageous to do so unless you're actually going to need that higher production capacity in the long term.
Right now the munitions cost is estimated at $10 Billion with a replacement time of 1-4 years. Note that only a fraction of the US's inventory was actually used, for example the US used about 1000 tomahawks over the course of the conflict and still has about 2000 in inventory. Obviously every munition you fire is one less round available immediately - if we get into a war with China next week we'll be in a bad spot - but that's not a problem solvable by overspending.
[0] https://www.csis.org/analysis/last-rounds-status-key-munitio...
Maybe they expect this not war to last 7x longer?
Have any of the not objectives for the not war been accomplished yet?
Funneling lots of money to the AI-Military industrial complex has been accomplished
Genociding half of Lebanon has been achieved.
Does anyone have the number that would have been required to pay off all student loans that SCOTUS blocked?
One time $10k per borrower forgiveness was estimated to cost $300 to $330 billion.
Of course this cost would be distributed over time, and the economic benefits of putting substantial spending money in the pockets of younger adults would have the potential to significantly offset or exceed these costs.
> ...cancel about $430 billion in debt principal and affect nearly all borrowers...
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/22-506_nmip.pdf
Total student loans are about $1.8 trillion. SCOTUS blocked forgiveness on $400 billion of that.
Trump-led tax cut policies reduced revenues by ~$1.5 trillion in his first term, and ~$5 trillion in his second term. $800B of PPP loans were forgiven. The oft-cited ICE and CBP budget increases were about $140 billion.
I can't find many other policies championed by Trump that accounted for increases >$200B in increased spending. As a result, there's not really any good 1:1 "Trump is willing to spend $400B on $X but not student loans". Most of his national debt impact has been via tax cuts rather than spending. Where spending did increase in large amounts, it was mostly for the Pentagon, and some % of those increases likely would have occurred under any other administration - so it's hard for me to carve out what Pentagon budget increases were due to his policies vs. the base-case for how much they would have increased otherwise.
$400 billion
I’d be okay with them forgiving student loans so long as they also pay me back for what I paid back.
I think the best course is to allow students to default on their loans. With backed loans Unis know they’ll get their money one way or the other and keep ballooning their admin costs.
Why does improving things for future generations need to be held up until we can undo mistakes already done? The ladder got pulled up and some of us needed to scramble, but can't we lower the ladder back down for them anyway?
We can do both. We can help people already saddled with debt, and also do things to prevent future generations from being saddled with debt in the first place. People who managed to climb out of the hole (a demographic I am also part of) are the least in need of consideration.
We can help them by allowing students to default on their loans. It still costs us taxpayers but at least it keeps universities honest.
If you want to keep Unis honest, why not make them all public and financially regulated? Seems like the free market incentives should be removed from this essential service...
Because we're still alive and also have a future and if the goal is to help people, there is no reason to draw the line at "paid it off already" when money is fungible and can still be used to secure a more comfortable future. Having paid off debts doesn't mean you climbed out of the hole, it means you did the responsible thing when you could have easily stashed the money away for your own retirement.
I'm not saying we shouldn't help people like us, who already paid off large sums of loans. I'm asking why we should only help people still saddled with debt if we also help people like us at the same time. That's classic crab mentality.
> it means you did the responsible thing
Not all fields are lucrative enough that paying off a pile of loans is even feasible. With how college is often pushes as all but required for many kids, it isn't possible to make an informed decision.
$400B
A small price to pay to teach the mullahs a good lesson.
For comparison, Iran's annual military budget is somewhere between $7B and $11B [1], representing 2-2.5% of estimated GDP. The US military budget currently exceeds $1T+ and the ask for 2026 is expected to be $1.5T+, representing almost 5% of GDP. And the US simply cannot end this conflict militarily short of the use of nuclear weapons. I don't mean that as hyperbole. I mean it literally.
There are long-term consequences to this war (and the 12 day war last year), namely the depletion of missile defence munitions (eg Patriot, THAAD) that will take years to replenish and this will have ripple effects on allies as well as certain theaters (eg moving THAAD interceptors and radars from South Korea to the Gulf).
Over half of the military budget goes towards weapon systems, arguably incredibly overpriced weapon systems. Put another way, it's a scam to move money from government coffers to private weapons manufacturers.
The inability to open the Strait of Hormuz militarily was not a surprise to US military leadership or intelligence agencies. It was only a surprise to the president (IMHO) who believed he could do a repeat of a Venezuelan decapitation strike. But Iran unlike Venezuela has suffered under reprehensible and unjustifiable sanctions and military adventurism by the US and its proxies such that the entire Iranian national project is built to resist US aggression, understandably. So that was never going to work.
This will have to end diplomatically. It will be worse for the US than it was before this war. Iran has something better than a nuke: it has a nuke they can use (e closing the Strait) and the US forced them to use it and prove that it works.
Now it's just a questio9n of how long this impassse goes on for before it ends and so far at least the US would rather let the world burn than split with Israel. Again without hyperbole I say, splitting with Israel effectively means the end of American empire. And the whole world is suffering for it.
[1]: https://tradingeconomics.com/iran/military-expenditure
I would merely point out, since the operation started, global terrorism has fallen quite dramatically. Freedom isn’t free; never has been.
Yes, it's great that civilian homes and infrastructure are sacrosanct now. Saracasm aside, that's a matter of perspective, no?
They don't want to waste their evil plan of assassination, just to be send to the 17th page of the newspapers.
Domestic terrorism is up though. The American public wants nothing to do with being world police.
correlation, therefor causation! simple as.
all their numbers are a lie
they've spent more than $25 BILLION on just weapons which have to be replaced so it's already twice that number
and for more examples we know now the true cost of militarization since 9/11 was $21 TRILLION
it's at least half the national debt if not more
https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militariz...
Remember, beyond the cost of war, every day the cost of gas is +$1 that's another BILLION dollars being siphoned out of the US economy, EVERY DAY
the strait is not opening this year, maybe not even before 2029 at this rate
that's TRILLIONS
time for a windfall profits tax on the US oil industry
Perspective:
- $9b per month increase in US oil export revenue as a result offsets probably 40% of the cost.
- Several trillion (with a 'T") of realized and yet to be realized FDI commitments from gulf states more than offsets cost by about 3x.
- A nuclear Iran carries economic costs I won't detail here to prevent a wall of text. In sum, forces other countries to go nuclear and take other actions to manage risk, and this happens in ways that could severely impact US dollar standing, US debt standing and US military spending. Its an interconnected world.
I know its unpopular to be pro-USA and pro-government on HN, but someone has to be the voice of reason - even if its at the bottom of the page.
-
A problem with your "voice of reason" is the assumption that it will prevent nukes in Iran or the region. The US people have just offered an object lesson in why deterrent weapons are useful. How capricious they are in diplomacy. And how willing Americans are to withdraw boots on the ground in allied countries. Of course most of that won't be surprising to Iranians.
By the way, this is just the estimate from Pete Hegseth, who has demonstrated himself to be an unreliable narrator. This administration seems to have difficulty with numbers in general, accurate numbers in particular. The real cost is likely twice this, or higher.
For example, roughly 50% of our missile stockpiles have been depleted during this "excursion."
All of the jokes about reported Soviet production numbers come to mind. This administration has zero credibility in speaking the truth, especially when the outcome is embarrassing.
I do not know what to believe, and I hate it.
As a European center/moderate kind of person I agree with the US POTUS about this one thing: Iran can not be allowed to build nuclear weapons.
I personally don’t buy the line of thought that Iran has no such ambitions; YMMV.
Whether this war is effective at stopping that is another question.
They had an agreement that was working which Trump tore up and then went to war on Israel’s behalf. So it was largely a solved problem until Trump created the problem.
There are two perspectives here:
Americans like you (I rudely assume) care more about US domestic policies than I do.
Foreigners like me care more about global stability compared to US domestic policies.
"Foreigners like me care more about global stability" yes so continue to rain bombs on the middle east, accept their poorest as refugees, and continue to support Israeli expansion. All of this leads to global stability. It's definitely not the reason behind global instability.
European takes are usually the funniest. It's literal racism (as in, one race is better than the other) but it's packaged in such a ridiculous way that you somehow suggest that it's doing others a favor.
I remember before the election I read a few people on HN say Trump is the most anti-war president they have ever seen and that all the talk about him letting Israel flatten Palestine was fearmongering. Wonder how they feel now.
I think he ran on ending "forever wars", not whether or not Israel could flatten Palestine. He would probably also argue that Iran is a 47 year forever war that he is finally ending.
I guess one of the Koreas should watch out since Trump might want to end that "forever war" as well. Flip a coin to decide which one.
He made efforts to end that already by being the first sitting president to meet with them during his first term, so I guess we'll see but Cuba is apparently next in line...
I felt more or less like this, though I don't know if I posted it on HN. Lots of things I didn't like about Trump, but I did favour the less interventionist foreign policy he promised and initially delivered.
Now I feel I was wrong and Trump is just averagely warmongering, as US presidents go.
Trump kidnaps a sitting president of a foreign nation after months of conducting strikes in the Caribbean. This is not a war but calling him "averagely warmongering" is just wrong.
Which American president did not cause the removal of a sitting leader of a foreign nation from power? Doing it bloodlessly rather than through direct military force or by arming local terrorists absolutely does make you less warmongering than average.
Honest question; why did you believe that about Trump? He was, and is, a serial lier and famously inconsistent. In his first term he moved on the same conflicts he has started now, but was held back circumstances and a cabinet that wasn't 100% yes men. I never understood how anyone could see Trump as the anti-war candidate during the election.
I believed it because he didn't start the same conflicts he started now. More fool me, perhaps, but one person's "held back by circumstances" is another person's "it was all bluster anyway".
It was also consistent with a broader policy of isolationism shown during his first term. Reducing support for NATO, backing out of trade deals - all consistent with America First and not being the world's policeman, which has been the US's justification for every war in the last 80 years.
I'm not American, so probably have a different perspective on this from Americans. But also that's a reason for me to judge a US president disproportionately more on his foreign policy than on say, healthcare or which bathroom people should use.
They definitely don't feel remorse.
He keeps claiming falsely that he's "ended 8 wars," but at this point he's actually attacked 8 different countries.
Up is always down with these people.
I muse on this as well but recently I'm struck that the entire conversation is something of a distraction. Everyone is focused on the current administration, what they're doing right or wrong, contrasting it with Biden, etc.
My question is - how did we even reach this point? I understand people didn't like Hillary Clinton and the way they dealt with Biden's age was abysmal when he was in office.
But I have literally never seen anyone express that they wish Clinton had won over Trump back in 2016. I find that really strange.
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The cost to operate the Federal government for one day is about $18 billion.
The only way you could arrive at such a high figure is if you included transfer payments like Social Security and Medicare in "the cost to run the government", which is not how most people understand "the cost to run the government".
Social security and Medicare account for 36% of the Federal budget and are absolutely understood as a cost to run the government. Calling them transfer payments doesn't obviate the fact that they are costs to American taxpayers. Social security and Medicare are also the two Federal outlays that economists fear will bankrupt the United States.
The entire NSF budget, our basic science infrastructure which is currently being destroyed by withholding grant funds against Congress' wishes, is only half of that. And Trump's budget cut it in half, Congress had to push back to avoid throwing away half of a carefully grown research industry.
Meanwhile Trump also wants to increase the daily allocation of military spending by $1.3B per day, to go to useless and unproductive contractors such as his son, rather than truly effective defense spending.
[citation needed]
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...