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military budget
Let's Be Very Clear: Trump's Iran War Is Making You Poorer
In addition to reducing our security and jeopardizing the well-being of people around the world, his belligerence will cost us a huge amount of money. But at least he and his friends will get even richer.
Apr 02, 2026
Our Secretary of Defense (or War) Pete Hegseth seems to be having a really great time killing people in Iran, but his live action video games come at a big cost, not just in lives, but in budget dollars. To be clear, the main reason to be opposed to this pointless war is its impact on the people of Iran and elsewhere in the region. But it also has a huge economic cost that is seriously underappreciated.
The short-term cost is the shortage of oil, natural gas, fertilizers, and other items that would ordinarily travel through the Straits of Hormuz. This shortage has already sent prices of many items soaring. The impact is not just on the goods themselves, but there is a large secondary impact due to higher shipping costs, and if fertilizer supplies are not resumed soon, higher food prices, due to lower crop yields. This is a big hit to people in wealthy countries, but it is life-threatening to people living on the edge in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
But in addition to the short-term cost, there is also a longer-term cost insofar as we are making new enemies and therefore will have higher bills for military spending long into the future. We already got the first taste of this as the Trump administration floated the idea of a $200 billion special appropriation to cover the cost of the war.
The Military Is Really Big Bucks
There is remarkably little appreciation of how much money is at stake with wars and the military. This is because the media have a deliberate policy of uninformative budget reporting. They just write huge numbers in the millions or billions, knowing they are completely meaningless to almost everyone who sees them.
Trump seems determined to raise military spending even further. He has said he wants the country to spend 5% of GDP, or $1.5 trillion a year, on the military. This comes to $12,000 per household. That’s real money.
It would be virtually costless to provide some context for these numbers, for example, expressing them as a percentage of the budget. That would take any competent reporter 10 seconds and add maybe 10 words to a news article. This would tell you that the $200 billion (2.7% of the budget) Trump wants for his Iran war is a relatively big deal, while the $550 million (0.008% of the budget) Trump saved us by defunding public broadcasting was not.
It is striking to see that Congress might be willing to quickly cough up this money when it has refused far smaller sums that could have made a huge difference in the lives of tens of millions of people. For example, the extension of the Covid-19 relief enhancement of the Earned Income Tax Credit would have cost around $40 billion (0.6% of the budget) annually. Extending the more generous Obamacare subsidies would have cost $27 billion (0.4% of the budget) annually.
And it is important to remember that these increased costs are not likely to be just a one-year expenditure. The military budget was 3.0% of GDP in 2001, before the war in Afghanistan, and projected to fall to 2.7% over the next several years. Instead, we got the Afghan War followed by the invasion of Iraq. By 2010, spending was up to 4.6% of GDP. The difference between actual and projected spending comes to almost 2.0% of GDP, or more than $600 billion annually in today’s economy.
The Peace Dividend
In contrast to the Trump administration’s efforts to seek enemies, in the 1980s and 1990s, the United States looked to diffuse tensions with the Soviet Union and saved a huge amount of money on military spending as a result. Military spending hit a post-Vietnam War peak of 6.1% of GDP in 1986. It then fell sharply as Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush I negotiated arms control agreements with the Soviet Union. It was down to 4.7% of GDP in fiscal 1992, when the Soviet Union collapsed. It continued to fall through the 1990s, when the United States faced no major enemies.
At that point, Russia was actually a limited ally. There were many people in the foreign policy establishment who wanted to keep it that way, looking to accommodate post-Soviet Russia in a post-Cold War world.
Instead, we took the direction of expanding NATO eastward, incorporating the former East Bloc countries into NATO, starting with Hungary. Eventually, all the former East Bloc countries were added to NATO, and then former Soviet republics such as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were added. In 2008, President George W. Bush pushed for the addition of Ukraine and Georgia as well.
It is worth noting that it was not pre-ordained that NATO would be expanded eastward. NATO was formed as an anti-Soviet alliance. With the Soviet Union out of business, it was reasonable to think that NATO would be disbanded.
This was not just the dream of fringe peaceniks; many fully credentialled cold warriors also argued against expanding NATO eastward. This list includes Jack Matlock and Richard Pipes, both of whom held high-level positions under Reagan. It also included George Kennan, the godfather of the Cold War doctrine of containment. Even Henry Kissinger opposed including Ukraine in NATO.
It’s not clear whether Russia would have developed into a hostile state and potential enemy if NATO had not continued to exist and expand Eastward. We can all share our speculations on that counterfactual, but one thing that is not debatable is that having a major enemy is costly.
The Iran Nuclear Deal and Trump’s War
President Barack Obama negotiated an agreement to restrain Iran from developing nuclear weapons in 2015. While there were issued raised with the monitoring of the deal, rather than trying to work through these problems, Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018. That decision, along with President Joe Biden’s failure to restore the agreement, created the conditions under which a second Trump administration could be pushed by Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu into this war. The war has already proved incredibly costly for the country and the world, and the costs could well go far higher.
But apart from this war, Trump seems determined to raise military spending even further. He has said he wants the country to spend 5% of GDP, or $1.5 trillion a year, on the military. This comes to $12,000 per household. That’s real money.
That is a lot of money to spend for no obvious reason. It means less money for healthcare, childcare, education, and many other items that people care about.
If the point is to put taxpayer dollars into the pockets of his family and friends, it can work out just fine. Until there is evidence otherwise, we should assume this is Trump’s real agenda for his big military budget.
The question people should be asking is who is this spending supposed to defend us against? Perhaps Trump has Russia in mind, but he is supposed to be good buddies with its President Vladimir Putin. Besides, Russia’s GDP is less than a quarter the size of the US economy. Do we really need to spend an amount that is more than 20% of Russia’s GDP to protect us against them? Can our military be that inefficient and corrupt?
Maybe Trump is thinking of China. That would be a problem, since China’s economy is already one-third larger than ours and growing far more rapidly. If Trump’s plan is to have a New Cold War with China, that is one we are likely to lose, especially since he just told all our allies to go to hell.
As with the Iran War, Trump’s push towards a newly militarized economy does not seem well-considered. Or at least it doesn’t seem well-considered as a defense strategy. If the point is to put taxpayer dollars into the pockets of his family and friends, it can work out just fine. Until there is evidence otherwise, we should assume this is Trump’s real agenda for his big military budget.
In addition to reducing our security and jeopardizing the well-being of people around the world, Donald Trump’s belligerence will cost us a huge amount of money. But at least his family and friends will get even richer. Who knows, maybe he will even get the Nobel Peace Prize this year.
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Our Unequal Economy Means the US Can't Quit War
The unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a group of oligarchs pushes the United States toward a military economy.
Dec 29, 2025
The United States is drawn to war on every front, like a moth to a candle. It does not matter that Americans are sick of foreign wars stretching back 25 years in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and now Venezuela, wars that have bankrupted the nation. It has no effect that the United States lacks the economic, technological, and manufacturing capacity necessary to sustain a conventional war. Nor would the United States likely win an unconventional war employing nanotechnology, biotechnology, and information warfare.
The critics allowed to appear on TV like John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs attribute this warmongering to the foolishness and the ignorance of political leaders like President Donald Trump, or to the incompetence of bureaucrats. They intentionally avoid any analysis of the economic structure of the United States, or the role of multinational banks and corporations in the formulation of policy. Their only explanation for the drive for war is the foolish actions of a “few bad apples.”
No one wants war, including the rich and powerful on all sides, in Beijing and Washington, in Berlin and Moscow, in Tehran and Tel Aviv. Yet the beating of the drums of war continues, and it grows louder. The appetite for war spreads like a vermillion fungus across the entire nation, with a military culture pushed through newspapers, movies, and television broadcasts. Preparation for war is a means of controlling the “little people” in a totalitarian manner.
The US government is pressuring every ally to rapidly increase defense spending, up to 5%, and to do so far more rapidly than can possibly be done in such a short time without massive corruption and waste. The military buildup is but a transfer of wealth, not an increase in security.
So, Why War?
The United States is collapsing as an economy, as a society, and as a civilization, weighed down by a massive debt, burdened by collapsing infrastructure and dying educational and research institutions, and strangled by a culture of pornography and narcissism. Above all, the extreme concentration of wealth over the last 20 years, since government was captured completely by the super rich, has meant that a handful of conceited frauds can determine the policy for the entire nation, and decide the fate of everyone. The basic interests of the vast majority of citizens are entirely ignored. The republic, and all traces of participatory democracy, have been consigned to the trash bin of history.
The international trade system and the embrace of “free trade” ideology played a major role in pushing the United States toward war around the world. Supply chains link together factories in loops that encircle the globe. Manufactured goods and agricultural products are brought into the United States from over the world, not because doing so is good for Americans, but because the multinational banks that control the economy seek out the cheapest labor and cheapest goods. Virtually all consumer goods in the United States go through logistics and distribution systems controlled by multinational corporations. Unlike the situation in 1945, a large part of the money that citizens (rebranded as “consumers”) spend at Walmart, Best Buy, or Amazon goes to the stockholders of those corporations and offers little or no benefit for the local economy.
The increase in military spending is a policy choice; it is the only way to avoid economic collapse.
Until the 1950s, most of what Americans ate came from local, family-owned farms. Clothes and furniture were also produced locally. Now that production and distribution have been spread all over the globe, events far away directly impact the US economy, and sometimes politicians feel pressure to use military threats, or responses, to protect American corporate interests (repackaged as “national security”).
So, too, US dependency on petroleum did not exist in the 1920s or dependency on rare earth metals in the 1980s. These are problems created by the decisions of corporations to introduce technologies that offered some conveniences, but at the price of extreme dependency of citizens on technology, which has generated large corporate profits.
The relocation of American manufacturing overseas also means that the only employment available in many regions, especially rural areas, is as police officers, guards at prisons, soldiers, or other positions in the military, police, or surveillance system. These days, security and the military are the only parts of the government budget that are growing.
The last decade has seen employment in defense surge by 40%, reaching 1.4% of the total employment base. In 2022-2023 alone the workforce expanded by 4.8% in contrast to an average of 1.7%.
No politician can oppose the increase in the military budget because, although constant foreign wars do great damage to the economy as a whole, the military has become the only part of government that increases opportunities for employment locally.
The US economy is increasingly controlled by a small number of rich families. The wages of American workers have been reduced, and the costs of living greatly increased for the profit of the few. The unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a group of oligarchs has changed everything. This restructuring of society may not seem to be military in nature, but it pushes the United States toward a military economy.
The End of the Welfare State
The disposable income of workers increased beginning in the 1940s because of the redistribution of wealth forced by the reforms of the New Deal. These reforms also allowed for corporations to make enormous profits after the 1950s by selling consumer products to working people who had the disposable income to purchase them. From the 1960s on, consumption, growth, and the stock market became the primary tools for assessing the health of the economy.
Particularly from the 1970s on, this system effectively funneled wealth from working people to the wealthiest. But today consumption by workers, the middle class, and even the upper-middle class is no longer sufficient to generate profits for corporations because the people cannot spend any more. Banks have been forced to look for some other source of profit to pay off their debts. One direction they looked has been the military. Military spending creates steady demand that is not tied to market conditions, or economic booms and busts. It is funded by the people through taxes, or through the inflation created by the deficit spending that funds military expenditures.
The increase in military spending is a policy choice; it is the only way to avoid economic collapse. It must be justified by threats from China, Russia, and Iran, or terrorism. Intelligence agencies responding to the demands of banks to do everything they can to create trouble with those countries.
The true three branches of government are the politicians, the bankers, and the generals.
Companies like Oracle, Palantir, Google, and Amazon not only grow fat like ticks feeding on the military and intelligence budgets, they are merging with banks and using their control of the IT systems that power banks as a means to seize control of money itself through digitalization of the dollar, or the introduction of cryptocurrencies.
One of the most powerful billionaires, Larry Ellison, has launched a campaign to dominate media through the control of social media, entertainment, and news broadcasting. The Trump administration forced TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to turn over its operations in the United States to a consortium headed by Ellison’s company Oracle in December 2025. Oracle grew to global influence as a major contractor for the CIA, and Ellison is a strong Trump supporter.
Since Ellison’s son David was installed as CEO in August 2025 of the new entertainment conglomerate Paramount Skydance—the merger of Paramount Global, Skydance Media, and National Amusements—father and son have been raising enormous funds for a hostile takeover of Warner Brothers that would give them unprecedented control over entertainment and journalism in the United States. Already CBS, under Ellison rule, has cancelled at the last minute a "60 Minutes" report on the notorious El Salvadorian prison CECOT.
These IT firms made those billions by taking out massive loans that they then used to buy back their own stock. They have nothing but debt and money in digital form. War, the threat of war, the buildup for war, is what keeps them going.
Impact on Governance
The United States government is a republic consisting of three branches: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. The three branches complement each other, and they also regulate and balance out each other. This system ensures that power is not concentrated in any one place.
That was a long time ago. How does politics really work today?
There are three real branches of government today, and they are quite different than those described in the Constitution. The true three branches of government are the politicians, the bankers, and the generals. They are the ultimate powers behind the government, and they balance each other out because they operate at different levels and have different strengths.
The concentration of wealth has almost eliminated the impact of citizens on policy.
The politicians are able to form temporary alliances among interest groups in business, finance, and government and negotiate among them to determine policy. The bankers control money and have the power of financial manipulation to shut down the entire economy, or the activities of opponents. The generals possess a chain of command that cannot be easily broken by exterior forces, even by money, and they have the ability to use force directly, without relying on a third party, to achieve their goals.
In a healthy society, where citizens actually play a role in politics, the politicians rise to the top because their primary mission is serving the needs of their clients, whether they are bankers, businessmen, generals, or other interest groups in the general population. Politicians can play the central role because they reflect the needs of citizens. As long as politicians can effectively meet the needs of the bankers, the generals, and the citizens, and keep the money flowing to them, the system remains stable.
If wealth is too concentrated, however, to the degree that the bankers can pay off everyone and gain complete control of the economy, then they rise to the top because bankers need only service a small number of the super rich to obtain absolute power. The politicians become their puppets, and the generals are paid off by the bankers. That is what the political system in the United States has become today.
A political system run by bankers, however, will encounter enormous problems over time because everything will be decided on the basis of short-term profits, and no one will do anything for the sake of others, or follow an ideal greater than personal interest. As a result, the foundations of government, and of society, will crumble. Eventually the government will collapse into anarchy, or it will drift into war as a means of generating profits and enforcing the bankers’ iron-fisted rule over the people.
At that historical moment, the generals rise to the top because they have a viable chain of command that continues to function even as the government fails, and because they speak the language of force and violence, which will become the only language that has authority once the legitimacy of politicians and bankers has been destroyed.
The concentration of wealth has almost eliminated the impact of citizens on policy. The finance-driven speculative economy has brought trust in government and business to a new low. As a result, the only politicians in the Democratic Party who are able to take on the Trump administration are all former military and intelligence, and the election of a former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger as governor of Virginia suggests that the “CIA Democrats” have become the driving force in an ideologically bankrupt Democratic Party.
The financial kings, the bankers and billionaires, need make only one little mistake in order for the chain of command to be handed over to the military in the United States. Although military officers may not want war as individuals, once the order goes down, the entire process, especially in light of the massive increase in drones and robots in the military, will be literally on automatic.
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No, We Can't Deport Our Way Out of Gun Violence
Rather than embrace human complexity, we choose to create enemies. But this is exactly the mindset that motivates mass shooters.
Dec 21, 2025
I stare blankly at the news. Little men with guns once again stir the country—the world—into a state of shock and grief and chaos. Attention: Every last one of us is vulnerable to being eliminated... randomly,
On Saturday, December 13, there’s a classroom shooting at Brown University, in Providence. Rhode Island. Two students are killed, nine others wounded. A day later, in Sydney, Australia—in the midst of a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach—two gunmen fire into the crowd of celebrants. Fifteen people are killed. The shock is global. The grief and anger flow like blood.
So do the questions: Why? How can we stop this? How can we guarantee that life is safe?
Usually, the calls for change after mass shootings focus on political action: specifically, more serious gun control. Ironically, Australia does have serious gun control. And, unlike the US, mass shootings there are extremely rare, but they still happen, which indicates that legal efforts can play a significant, but not total, role in reducing violence.
Good guy vs. bad guy—good violence vs. bad violence—is the essence of linear thinking.
But that ain’t gonna happen in the USA—not until God knows when, which seriously expands and intensifies the nature of the questions we must start asking. Yeah, there are an incredible number of guns in the United States. Some 400 million of them. And embedded into American culture along with the presence of guns is the belief that they are necessary for our safety, even as they also jeopardize it. Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun. What a paradox.
And here’s where the process of change must begin. Good guy vs. bad guy—good violence vs. bad violence—is the essence of linear thinking. One person wins, one person loses. And if I draw my gun first, yeehaw, I’m the winner. This simplistic mindset is, and has long been, part of who we are—ultimately resulting, good God, in stockpiles of nuclear weapons, giving humanity the opportunity to commit mass suicide.
And while nukes may be declared to be simply deterrents for our enemies—threatening mutually assured destruction (oh, the MADness)—the global, and especially the US, non-nuclear military budget is itself almost beyond comprehension: larger by far than what we spend on healthcare, education, diplomacy, or environmental salvation, aka, human survival.
As Ivana Nikolić Hughes writes at Common Dreams: “But I think that the problem is far deeper than lack of gun control. The problem lies in having a state, a society, a world, in which violence is not only excused and sanctioned on a regular basis, but celebrated both as a matter of history, but also the present and the future.”
And this thinking isn’t sheerly political. It permeates our social and cultural infrastructure. And it gets personal. “We live in a culture of violence, where weapons are a symbol of power,” Ana Nogales writes in Psychology Today. And having power—over others—also means having the ability, and perhaps the motive, to dehumanize them. And this is the source of human violence—both the kind we hate (mass killings) and the kind we worship (war).
All of which leads me to a quote I heard the other day, in regard to the Bondi Beach shootings, which left me groping for sanity. The speaker was Indiana Republican Sen. Jim Banks, speaking on Fox News. “In America,” he said, “we have to do more to deport terrorists out of the United States to make sure this doesn’t happen in the homeland, and root out antisemitism around the world as well.”
Flush ’em out! All of them—you know, the ones that are different from us. Skin color, whatever. This is the essence of dehumanization, and it’s how we govern. Rather than embrace human complexity, we choose to create enemies and declare them... deportable, and if necessary, killable. This mindset is infectious. Just ask the students at Brown University or the Hanukkah celebrants at Bondi Beach.
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