Comment by pastage
9 hours ago
I am very sure the west sacrificed a lot of wellbeing because of the vast amount of money spent on war. Peace time was great.
9 hours ago
I am very sure the west sacrificed a lot of wellbeing because of the vast amount of money spent on war. Peace time was great.
Not true. We spent more taxpayers' money on 2008 banks bailout than on every and any war (+ space race) combined.
Also, investing into military tech prevents war on your territory, which is, well, highly disruptive.
According to this [https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/costs-us-nuclear-weapo...], the US has already spent more than five trillion dollars on nuclear weapons.
Over 85 years and that's an inflation adjusted number. We give away more money each year (USAID/soft power efforts) than we spent on average on nuclear weapons. And neither of those items are of much significance on the US federal budget. Currently, social safety net programs are half of the federal budget and the total military budget is about 1/6th of the budget for reference (that's 2/3rd total between those two parts of the budget).