Pentagon Asking For Another $200 Billion For Iran War, Is That A Lot?

How about pulling back and buying everyone an ice cream truck instead?

We really should tax the rich.

What could the American government buy with the $200 billion the Pentagon is now demanding so it can continue reducing random Iranians to their component parts? So many things! Sure, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the nation’s overall spending every year. It’s nothing! It’s a cup of coffee, as Jerry Seinfeld might have said. It’s just one teeny, tiny war. Two hundred billion is a small price to pay for the military to have all its fun.

Still, though, let us think about that $200 billion and all it could bring back that we have spent the last year listening to Republicans and DOGE and Elon Musk and all those other rich fuck-knuckles tell us the nation simply can’t afford.

You could fund USAID and all its assistance programs for at least five more years, saving millions of lives over the long term.

You could keep two large local food-buying programs, one that pays for school breakfasts and lunches and another that helps food banks and other local groups provide food to their communities, going for another — let’s see, carry the 2 — 200 years.

You could buy Bari Weiss’s The Free Press 1,133 times, with a few bucks left over for 1,133 cheap rockets you could use to fire it into the sun 1,133 times.

And that’s just off the top of our head. There’s also all the medical research that Donald Trump’s administration has cancelled, which was working towards treatments and cures for some of the worst diseases known to humanity. You could fund all that research for decades on $200 billion and maybe find a cure for cancer. All cancer. You could hire back every single federal employee the government has fired in the last year several dozen times over. You could buy every household in America its own ice cream truck.

We could go on, but you get the idea.

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Our elected leaders are having a public debate about the wisdom of throwing $200 billion more at this sinkhole of a war we have undertaken with no allies and no strategic goals beyond the assumption Iran would fold like a bath towel after a day or two of sustained bombing. On one side, you have Democrats saying Fuck no to anymore war funding, as Rep. Adam Smith said very forcefully on Greg Sargent’s podcast this week with all sorts of profanity like a common Wonkette writer!

On the other hand, you have Republicans saying it would be harmful to the war effort to talk about the financial and physical and diplomatic costs to the people running it — Pete (Hic!) Hegseth, Marco Rubio — in public while it’s going on. A compelling point, if you have all the intellectual candlepower of a zucchini.

We ask this because the war cost a bit over $11 billion its first week alone, and it is about to go into its fourth week. We ask because recent figures show the US borrowing $50 billion per week every week since the beginning of the fiscal year last October. We ask because the US has added about $1 trillion to its debt in the last five months alone.

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This is all before we even get to the Pentagon’s upcoming budget request for the next fiscal year, which Trump himself has said was going to be $1.5 trillion, which is half a trillion more than the Pentagon asked for a mere year ago. That’s a 50 percent year-over-year increase in the defense budget, and they were telling us they would ask for that increase months before we started bombing Iran! So it’s on top of the $200 billion the Pentagon is asking for now.

And you know they will come looking for more once that $200 billion is gone, because there is no way this war will be over in a mere couple of weeks.

And this is all before we even get to the US debt going up to over $39 trillion as of a few days ago. It was around $19 trillion when Donald Trump first took office in 2017. So you can blame some of it on the Biden administration. But you can blame most of it on the self-described “king of debt” and all his flunkies.

To be fair, Republicans have floated one idea to pay for this war, which is that we will make the Iranians pay for it somehow:

Absolutely hilarious to listen to a Republican sneer that the Iranian regime has been “siphoning” money away from the country’s population for five decades. What does Perry think the American government has been doing? Do we need to send the congressman the first 300 words of this post?

Well. Making the loser pay a gazillion dollars to compensate the winner of a war has never backfired before, unless you count the Versailles Treaty after World War I, which led almost directly to World War II. We suppose the president would agree with us by saying that Germany’s conquest of Europe was simply a little excursion.

We are in no way opposed to deficit spending in general. But it’s more than fair to ask the Republicans why they are talking about spending hundreds of billions of dollars on this war with barely any questions asked. Funny how we always find money for war, but kids who could use a school lunch program are shit out of luck. How about you guys sack up and tell our Defense Secretary Tequila Pete to take a long walk off a short pier and hug an octopus?

Or tax the living fuck out of the rich already. Jeff Bezos was worth $240 billion as of December. Certainly $40 billion of that would be more than enough for him to survive on for the rest of his life. He would still be wealthy beyond belief, and our president could keep turning Iranians into hamburger without any additional costs to American taxpayers. Win-win! Well, maybe not for the Iranians, the entire Middle East, the world economy, global stability, the environment, and a future where people radicalized by this war take their revenge. But win-win for whomever is left over!

[Forbes / Time / NYT]

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