“They got money for war, but can’t feed the poor.” – Tupac Shakur
According to the Pentagon, the first week of the war against Iran that President Donald Trump involved the U.S. in voluntarily, not out of any discernible necessity, has cost the nation upwards of $11 billion.
The New York Times reported that Pentagon officials revealed the estimated price tag for the first six days of this war of choice to lawmakers in a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, saying the cost of the war had already exceeded $11.3 billion.
What’s worse is that the estimate doesn’t include all costs, and it’s much higher than previously projected.
From the Times: The estimate did not include many of the costs associated with the operation, such as the buildup of military hardware and personnel ahead of the first strikes. For that reason, lawmakers expect the number to grow considerably as the Pentagon continues to calculate the costs that accumulated just in the first week.
Still, it appeared to be the most comprehensive assessment Congress had received so far amid mounting questions about the objectives, scope, and time frame for the war. The New York Times and The Washington Post reported earlier that defense officials had said in recent congressional briefings that the military used up $5.6 billion of munitions in the first two days of the war.
That is a far larger amount and munitions burn rate than had been publicly disclosed. The Center for Strategic and International Studies had estimated that the first 100 hours of the operation cost $3.7 billion, or $891.4 million each day.
Not long ago, the U.S. government was shut down for roughly a month and a half, largely because one particular party thought we couldn’t afford to extend health care subsidies. MAGA Republicans are still trying to convince the nation that cutting SNAP benefits is an absolute necessity, lest they bankrupt the U.S. Trump has been telling U.S. citizens to cut back on their spending because his promise to bring down the price of goods turned out to be big, beautiful bullsh-t.
But we can afford a war of choice that has cost a billion dollars nearly a dozen times over in the first week.
Oh, well — at least our strikes on Iran aren’t killing innocent school children or anything like that.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration just keeps boasting about how it is “DEVASTATING” Iran with constant missile strikes. The tweet below was posted by the White House on the same day it was revealed that a preliminary investigation showed the U.S. was likely responsible for a missile striking an Iranian elementary school, reportedly killing 175 people, the overwhelming majority of whom were children.
“We won’t stop until the military objectives are met,” the White House tweeted.
Apparently, the administration means what it says, no matter the cost, whether we’re talking about the cost of lives or additional billions in spending that we’ve been told the nation can’t afford to spend on education, food security, healthcare, or anything else that would actually put “America first.” (And that’s their slogan, not all ours.)
Seriously, if there was any nation in need of an actual regime change, it’s currently the good, old U.S. of A.
