Fund Literally Anything But This
Regarding the Iran War -> Fund Literally Anything But This
Humans are terrible with large numbers. Once a purchase is bigger than ~$100, it’s impossible to truly cross-compare. And at the scale of billions, it is truly just storytelling.
Except that it is not.
It’s still real dollars. The math definitely maths in reality. Where math meets storytelling is in priorities, opportunity costs, and paths not taken. I love projects like this (another example) that highlight the tradeoffs rather than the stories.
It was only last month that we let subsidies for Obamacare insurance plans that are killing America’s self-employed (including farmers, entrepreneurs, small business, etc). That’s fine to make an argument against the subsidies – but don’t say we can’t afford them. Same with the swinging DOGE cuts to foreign aid last year. Same with deep cuts to public lands. That whole effort was framed as “cost cutting” – it wasn’t. We’ve now spent more money on bombs in two weeks than we spend on all of our public lands in an entire year. We spent more money in one day on bombs than our National Parks in a year.
The deepest irony is that we had a Republican-led Senate ratified, President-signed arms control treaty with Iran done…only to rip it up, lose our credibility, fail on a re-negotiation, then try to get it back with violence & burning money.
