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The "standard of life" BS is just that. One could argue that was the reason that interest rates were zero or not negative, but there is no logic in the old "protect the oil" type of standard of life BS....for the very simple reason that we, like China and Japan and Canada and any other place in the world, can BUY oil at market rates MUCH cheaper than the cost of War-Subsidized oil.
One could also say that perhaps 10 million or so Americans "standard of living" is propped up by the various spending....Rudy, for example, did 100's of millions with his "security consulting".
Lots of money to spread around in those trillions...to make sure you have the little guy, the pol, the manufacturer and all the rest "on your side"....
Bottom line - we'd be much better off without that wasted money.
We should always include total costs of the "Security State" which are vastly more than the tiny figures shown for war.
AND, these figures do not include human suffering (our own dead and wounded and so on).
The compounded value of the total security state since 9/11 is probably well north of 25 Trillion dollars.
Now...it's only fair to say that we needed to spend some of that on true defense...and on vets and other stuff. But we easily spent 10 Trillion more than we needed.
That would go a long way toward universal health care and such...
$25 Trillion spent.
The bigger question is: who got rich and who made the money?
That’s quite A LOT of a money FOR EVERYONE even if it gets equally distributed among 7 Bllion residents of the planet
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