 Hello and welcome back to the War, Economy and State podcast. This is the Foreign Policy and International Relations podcast for the Mises Institute. And I am Ryan McMakin, I'm executive editor at the Mises Institute and with me as always is my co-host, Zachary Yoast. And we're here today to talk a bit about military spending. Now Americans and especially US policy makers in Washington like to act as if there's no downside to military spending. You're not giving up anything to do it, there's limitless money. Dick Cheney famously said, deficits don't matter in order to justify endless spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. And is that true? Do deficits not matter at all? Do they have no effect on American policy or on the dollar or on the standard of living for Americans? Now the reality is, as we'll talk about here, is that you give up a lot in order to spend endlessly on military expenditures. It can be very costly in terms of inflation, in terms of devaluing your currency, in terms of granting the government more power. As Murray Rothbard was always clear, the biggest problem in terms of empowering the state has long been war and national security issues. That's long been the justification for pretty much all of it. In terms of going back to the state's birth back in the 17th century or even earlier. It's about war, it's justified by war. And here we are still encountering people who think that war is good for the economy, that there's really no price in terms of massive amounts of spending. So we're just going to talk about some of the issues surrounding that here today. And really it just continues to be an issue because of the large amounts of money the U.S. is spending to Ukraine. And Zach and I were just looking up these numbers, because of course they're constantly changing. And even in January, these numbers were at least $110 billion that the U.S. had already sent to Ukraine with more than half of it in terms of military spending. And of course you can't really believe what they tell you in terms of, oh well, the other half is not military spending, it's humanitarian spending, or it's some sort of like democracy fund, whatever that those sorts of words mean that they use. Given that Ukraine is ranked, what did we decide Zach, what number most corrupt country in the world? Number two in Europe, behind only Russia. So when you do send money to Ukraine, you have no idea where it ends up. It's no better than sending money to one of these African governments where the ruling class controls essentially everything, has all the guns, keeps all the money. And so we're flushing a lot of money down the toilet in Ukraine. And some Americans are starting to pick up on what the cost of that is, though. You will see in social media and elsewhere complaints about how what you've got are, you've got record number of people on food stamps, on disability, you've got bridges literally falling down, and people are being told, well, we got to send another $100 billion to Ukraine. Now I of course don't think any of that should be federal spending, the state should be allowed to keep money so that they can actually afford to build bridges that work and so on. But we shouldn't assume that everything is just so fine in the US that this country that has nothing to do with us therefore requires hundreds of billions of dollars from the US to keep it going while Americans are expected to pay ever larger amounts of money in regular taxes and in inflation and also lately in borrowing costs because constant deficit spending and borrowing also has the long term effect of sending up interest rates as well, which means you can't get as cheap a mortgage as you might have otherwise. So let's look at a bunch of these issues and I think part of the reason, Zach, that we thought about this was because you had come across some thoughts by Ludwig von Mises on military spending and maybe you can give us the short version of that and just some of his early thoughts, Mises being the leading liberal from Europe in his time and having a pretty deep understanding of war spending, what are some of the salient issues that he thinks that we should keep in mind when it comes to war spending? So this essay it's just called on paying for the costs of war and war loans and it was delivered as a talk in the summer of 1918 and it's just a fascinating short little essay for a lot of reasons. One, because it's very clear that Mises is a Austro-Hungarian patriot. He does not think that the, you know, that nations don't exist as some libertarians seem to think today. But what's another fascinating thing is how this is the summer of 1918 and he's saying, you know, we're doing a pretty great job so far. And, you know, then just a few months later, everything collapsed, but it's just sort of shows how World War One victory was an open question, sort of, right up to the end almost. But what's really interesting is his points about basically how are we going to fund and provide, you know, for a war? And I think one of the most important points he brings up that's totally forgotten, it seems, by people today in the age of modern monetary theory and whatnot is, he says, quote, war can only be waged out of currently available goods. One can fight only with the weapons on hand. All military needs must be met out of existing wealth. It is the present generation that is waging war from an economic point of view and it is this generation that must bear all the material costs of the war. And then he goes on to say, future generations, we're just going to be leaving left stuff because we blew it all up. But I think this is quite relevant because even people who are, you know, more economically literate than most people these days seem to not be making this connection when it comes to our aid to Ukraine. It's just sort of like there's a limited amount of material goods and services currently in existence. And if we're sending those to Ukraine, well, they can't be used on things here. And so when we get into our enormous annual budget deficit and things like that, it's highly relevant. People just seem to think there's this, there's not really a cost to what we're providing to Ukraine, leaving aside the potential for World War Three or, you know, an outbreak of nuclear war or something like that. Or, you know, the tens and tens of thousands of people being killed and millions displaced and all that for Americans, you know, if you are, you know, spending resources to build him our missile systems, those resources can't be used on other things. And sort of what was the impetus for me looking into this was, as people, I'm from Pittsburgh, people might recall last year, it was quite ironic. It was literally the day Biden was in town to visit a bridge collapsed in Pittsburgh. And, you know, Pittsburgh's called the city of bridges. We actually don't have the most bridges in the world, but we have a ton of bridges all over the place everywhere. And this bridge just collapsed. So everyone was like, oh, gee. And a few months ago, the county shut down a few bridges, I think, one or two bridges they just were like, well, these might collapse. So let's not drive on them right now. And so to me, it just was sort of, you know, like even setting aside where the source of funding comes from for building the bridges, state, federal, you know, privatized the bridges, whatever, resources are finite and resources are being allocated to war. And so they can't be allocated to other things. Or if they are being allocated, they're being, you know, there's less resources, higher costs, things like that. Yeah. And Eisenhower makes this point as well, right? This is, it's always fun when you find a choice quote from Eisenhower, right? A lot of people note his, his farewell speech and the whole military industrial complex issue. And it's fun. You can get a lot of quotes from people like Truman and Eisenhower complaining about the CIA and the U.S. security state that they had created and then regretted they had created later because the U.S. was changing so rapidly from a more or less free country into a, into a surveillance state that took a few decades to truly materialize. But you can really only date it back to the forties. And actually, we'll look at that in a coming episode when we talk about the release of this, these secrets and the, the prosecution of this Texara guy and how most of the laws under which he will be prosecuted and the laws claiming all the secrecy. They really only date from the National Security Acts of the late 1940s. This idea that, that there was, that there were state secrets in a way comparable to today in the year nine in 1901 or 1875. It just simply is untrue that the surveillance and security states a new thing, it's a post-World War II thing. And it comes with huge amounts of spending. And Eisenhower made this point, was that, and you pointed this out, was for every billion dollars you spend on the military, that's just money you cannot spend on something else. And people just have to admit that. And, and this may have been one of the reasons why Eisenhower was one of the very few presidents where military spending actually went down. Now, I don't go overboard on praising Eisenhower, who certainly didn't, didn't do anything to, to rein in the new deal. But he did have an understanding of the consequences of military spending, unlike most presidents. And he was relatively sane on that issue. And that's just one of the costs, then, of military spending. We can look at a variety of other costs as well. For example, well, of course, this is Salerno notes, right? And he's got a good essay called War and the Money Machine. And there's only three ways to raise funding, right, for a war. You can tax people, you can borrow, or borrow money, get convinced people to lend you money. Or you can essentially tax them through the inflation tax, that is, through simply printing or creating money. And this has led, then, to a need to borrow immense amounts of money, increases in the interest rate, more central bank intervention. And these all have real economic costs for people. They impoverish people. They limit the number of resources available. They destroy the buying power of the dollar. And let's just look at some of the historical way that war has been connected to that. Specifically, I've noted this in a couple of interviews recently and in an article, too, as I've been writing a lot on the origins of paper currency and the decline of the gold standard and how states during emergencies, quote, unquote, what the state determines to be an emergency isn't necessarily an emergency. But in cases of emergency, they even when there was a gold standard, these countries would go off the gold standard, like explicitly. And they would just say so. And this occurred in England, which had already been, well, as Britain at that point, had already been in a real and or de facto gold standard for decades at that point. And just said during the Napoleonic Wars, well, we need to be able to just simply create money in an unrestrained way. So we're not going to honor any any trading in of bank notes for gold. We're off the gold standard and we'll come back to it someday. So that essentially is what financed the war. Now, after the war, they would then go back and try to do enough austerity measures so that they could get the price of pound sterling back within a reasonable level of where it had been before the war. But that, of course, then requires that people pay after the war through austerity measures and through a declining standard of living to get back on the gold standard. So there's a real cost there. And then in World War One, of course, that broke the gold standard completely, where, again, they just announced we're going off of it because there is a quote unquote emergency, a much less of one, by the way, a totally an unconvincing declaration of an emergency. Whereas I could see in the case of the Napoleonic Wars, you could claim there was a real threat to British independence and World War One, not at all. But they decided that was an emergency, too, which, by the way, grew out of a secret treaty that the British government had and didn't tell anybody about. And so then that destroyed the gold standard. After that, Western Europe went under the gold exchange standard, which wasn't a real gold standard. It was just a matter of settling accounts in gold between nation states and huge banks in some cases. And so that was it that destroyed the money. And so in spite of all of these claims that war is good for the economy and all of that, we can see repeatedly that war is actually a means of destroying the currency in terms of its connection to gold and stable value. And that war generally is provided an excuse to manipulate the currency. But even after the end then of the gold standard, you still had a need to manipulate the currency in terms of interest rates. So all of these massive amounts of spending and borrowing that governments must do during wartime, that then causes interest rates to go up if you were to continue selling all of that government debt in the marketplace. And if you look at that issue, you can see what happens then is that central banks intervene and they just start monetizing the debt. So even during the gold standard, you just took it. You took the government off the gold standard and spent freely that way ruining people's purchasing power in that case. And then in later eras, you ruin their purchasing power. By just printing more money and pegging interest rates at a certain way. And here I'll explain how it does. There's a good passage from The Great Deformation by David Stockman. And he's talking about World War Two. He says, during the war, the Federal Reserve became the financing arm of the warfare state, making short shrift of any pretense of Fed independence. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau simply decreed that interest rates on the federal debt would be pegged. Obviously, the only way to enforce that peg was for the nation's central bank to purchase any and all treasury paper that did not find a private sector bid at or below the pegged yields. Accordingly, the Fed soon became a huge buyer of treasury securities, thereby monetizing federal debt on a scale never before imagined. So this was a money printing scheme where they realized that if you just kept rolling out huge amounts of debt to the public saying, hey, buy our government debt, buy our liberty bonds, all that sort of thing. Well, you're going to have to, people are going to run out of money or a desire to invest in that at some point. So you're going to have to then raise the yield in order to entice people to buy that debt and you can't keep doing that because that makes then the price of your debt go up, up, up and soon becomes unmanageable because then your debt service, it would be as if your home mortgage, the interest on your home mortgage kept adjusting up constantly and you just had to pay more and more on it. So they say, oh, you know how we'll solve that problem? We'll just peg the interest rate and how do you do that? Well, you just get the central bank then to buy all of your debt. So that's the post gold standard scheme that is used to finance wars. And the US has been using that in a full blown fashion as it did during World War Two or in a somewhat limited fashion where you have constant ongoing intervention from the central bank to manipulate interest rates and keep them to a manageably low level. And we've seen that in a new extreme version over the last decade or so. And now here we are facing high inflation rates as well as 32 trillion dollar debts and also debt service that's now reaching eight hundred billion dollars, which, by the way, is about equal to the entire defense budget now. So there's a tradeoff right there and you just have to keep asking yourself, well, are we just going to spend then a trillion dollars a year on debt service in order to keep all these wars going? And I think it's a good question. And I wonder, people, do people understand this at all? Or is the I assume the public is just completely in the dark in it. It doesn't care and has been convinced that it doesn't matter at all. So I don't know what's going to need to happen in order for people to think that you just can't keep spending like this, maybe just by pointing out things that can't be bought because you spent so much money on the war in Ukraine to defend one of the world's most corrupt governments. I don't know, but I guess we'll find out, especially as the financial situation worsens in the US. Right. And so going back to Eisenhower, why I love this speech, which is it's called The Chance for Peace, but it's also called The Cross of Iron Speech. Yeah, it's it's sort of astounding. It's like the most like literate any politician, you know, well, maybe aside from like Ron Paul has been on like the idea of like of trade off trade offs exist. So this is great line. Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed. Those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children's children. And he gives a few examples. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this, a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half a million bushels of wheat. And then he keeps giving more examples and more examples. And then he says, this is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron, which itself ties back to money. I think that was William Jennings Bryan, if I remember correctly, a cross of gold. He wanted to devalue the currency with silver. I think not my area of expertise, but it just, this talk is so great and just pointing out, you know, don't think of really what we're sending to Ukraine as a hundred and whatever billion dollars now. Think of it as material things that we now don't have. You know, you pop a tire on a pothole. Well, you know, we could have fixed that pothole really with this money. And I mean, really, it's just even more crazy given, as you've just pointed out, our insane levels of debt, which itself has, you know, the huge, you know, interest payments now. It's really mind boggling. Eisenhower, you know, I'm sure he would, or his speechwriter at least, could write a humdinger of a speech now, given the current craziness. But it's just, you know, I think, you know, I think if I'm remembering correctly, Mises later on in life became like, we need, you know, people to carry gold coins around for our currency to get it through their heads, you know, sort of, you know, the importance of the gold standard. And in a way, it's sort of like that. Similar, we need people to think in concrete terms, you know, is, you know, is the bridge you take on your morning commute collapsing? Well, you know, we spent $8 trillion on the war and terror between 2001 and 2022. Well, you know, and it's amazing how much the right wing, for lack of a better term, I mean, conservatives, people on that side of things, they really do associate military spending as just being costless. And I've gotten submissions as editor here from people trying to make the case that government spending on socialist stuff, on like health care, welfare, well, that's wasted money, but military spending, we can all agree that that's justifiable. And of course, you just ask them then, well, the economic effects are indistinguishable, right? This is where Rothbard makes all sorts of good arguments in terms of all government spending, regardless of what it is on, distorts the economy, causes price increases in certain areas, whatever it's spending on, and costs you a lot of money. Because if the government is spending, is buying up huge amounts of steel for military operations, that's going to inflate the price of steel. And if you need steel for your factory to produce automobiles or some civilian purpose, well, guess what, you're paying a lot more for that now. And I mean, that's exactly the point that Eisenhower was making in a less technical way, was that's government spending. It's going in one place, and not only is it taking resources from one place to another, but it's also driving up prices. And your own government is competing against you then for resources. And that's a thing about government spending. It doesn't matter what they're spending on. Now, if you're just making some blanket statement that all military spending is fine, yeah, come to me and convince me that the F-35 has been a very sound and prudent way to spend U.S. dollars. You're not going to convince me of that. These are huge boondoggles that take place all over the place. And not to mention the fact that the Pentagon doesn't even know where its money is going. It repeatedly fails, audits has no idea what the money is going to. We've spent trillions of dollars on wars that have been lost as you pointed out in the cost of war project data that they send out. And you need to get specific. If you're going to convince me that military spending, we can all agree, is just fine. And what they then try to do is they try to pin on you this idea that you must be some sort of pacifist because you don't want to spend a trillion dollars on the F-35. And how does that work? Especially if you note that the reason the United States faces no foreign threats is because of the Navy and the nuclear arsenal. So that's my position. And this idea of having a large army, the army serves no purpose, really. The standing army, right? The National Guard has a defensive purpose. The standing army has no purpose except to occupy foreign countries. It's very necessary for wars like Iraq and Afghanistan. And it has really no use other than that. And you could say very similar things about the Marines exist really to start miniature wars with other countries. They're very useful in that, too. Very little defense purpose in terms of defending U.S. shores and deterring any sort of foreign aggression against the U.S. Unless you believe that the entire world is the realm of the U.S. and the U.S. needs to be everywhere always defending every little corner that Washington could construe represents some sort of interest. Somehow the most prosperous period for the United States involving the greatest amount of gains and standard of living, the U.S. didn't engage in any of that at all. The U.S. was primarily concerned with trade and with peace. We're talking here about the 19th century. And except for the period leading up a period around World War I, even in through the 20s, there was so little intervention. Even if you look at the stuff that was going on in Latin America, that didn't even, that I mean, that just doesn't compare to what the U.S. is doing now. So sorry, this false dichotomy between either spend endlessly on everything or you're some sort of pie in the sky pacifist is a complete BS claim that those people like to make. And by the way, all those stuff you just read from Eisenhower. Man, can you imagine a president saying stuff like that today? I mean, if it was even a Republican getting up and saying there would be denounced as some sort of hippie. And so you'd, I mean, Max Boot would be going on about what a traitor that person is for sprave is suggesting such things. So that's where American rhetoric is now in terms of military spending. And so we got a long way to go, but you can see what's going on there. And this brings us to an issue you brought up, right? About how, oh, the U.S. spending isn't big at all when you compare it to GDP. And when you look at actual inflation adjusted numbers spent on defense spending, military spending, it's higher than it was during the Cold War, during the Reagan years. And there are some periods where it's slightly lower now in inflation, adjusted dollars compared to some peaks like in the days of the surge that we were told was going to win the war in Iraq, I believe, was where the surge was. I can't even keep track. And that, of course, all just failed miserably, but there were some huge spending in those years, which now inflation adjusted spending is slightly below that, but certainly near or at historic highs when you can look at almost all years. The only time it was higher was during World War II. And but you've got people out there claiming that, well, the GDP has grown. So now we're at like a historic low in terms of the percentages that people are spending on GDP. So let's look at some of the actual numbers, right? The numbers are around 800 and we're quickly rapidly heading to $900 billion in terms of military spending. And these are just off the chart sorts of spending, even by Cold War standards. And certainly when Eisenhower was faced with those sorts of numbers, he wanted to actually cut spending. And this was in the days of the Soviet Union testing new nukes. So completely, it could have easily been justified more military spending back at that time. But now we're being constantly told, oh, you need another $150 billion to be spent. Biden puts in his request. Congress spends even more than is requested from the White House, because it's just so popular to keep spending this sort of money. And no talk about cutting back whatsoever. And so, no, military spending is not at some kind of historic low, except by that one single measure is of compared to GDP. But if you think about it, there's no reason why military spending should keep up with GDP. Think about it in terms of, say, the U.S. population increased by 50% from 200 million to 300 million. And that could then you could argue, oh, well, that would increase GDP by 50% too, because you're assuming everyone's at the same level of productivity. Why should that mean that defense spending needs to go up by 50% as well? Now that the Dallas metro area has 50% more people, it now requires 50% more military spending to prevent the Chinese from rolling through Dallas? What's the rationale? There's no reason why a larger population, larger GDP, should require defense spending to increase in kind. So that's a nonsense measure. What we need to be looking at is just in terms of how much money is really being sucked out of the economy for all this. And does any of it have anything to do with defending North America or the United States specifically? And very little of it does. Right. And I think with the people being like, oh, we're spending so little as a percentage of GDP, these are probably the poor rich, like the people who make six figures but are living paycheck to paycheck because they engage in lifestyle inflation rather than maintaining sort of a moderate, modest sort of lifestyle. It's like, I got a raise, time to upgrade to an even bigger house, new car, et cetera, et cetera. So we have to continually be living beyond our means no matter how much money we get. And on the point of how much defense, I mean, I recall a few years ago, you wrote a rebuttal to some free market economist who said, well, you can never have too much defense as a good. And it's like, this is crazy talk. It's not exactly like we have a market process for figuring out the optimal level of defense spending. But even without that, we can use our brains. There's no power on earth that can invade us. We have nukes. We have the Navy, as you pointed out. And no one has the power of projection capability to cross water, to get here, all those sorts of things. And another thing I'd point out is that the one, to my mind, I approve of this. Some libertarians don't like me. I get a bad check mark for it. But I'm all in favor of arms exports. I mean, I'm okay with the government restricting it. In some capacities, I don't think firms should be selling weapons to Russia or China, for instance. But like Taiwan, I'm quite an advocate of selling oodles of weapons to Taiwan. And, you know, we're not selling weapons to your crane. We're giving them, you know, gajillions of dollars worth of weapons, just handing it over. And again, for people who consider themselves, you know, national security hawks and whatnot, they don't want to face the trade offs that exist between sending stuff to Ukraine and selling weapons to Taiwan. There's a lot of debate about, like, oh, to what extent is, you know, all the stuff we're sending to Ukraine responsible for the backlog, which is just shy of $20 billion, last I checked, to Taiwan. And people are like, oh, we're sending different things, yada, yada, yada. But ultimately, I don't think that is a very good argument. One, because of just material scarcity, it's like the steel that's going into whatever we're sending to Ukraine might not be something, you know, we should not probably be sending Abrams tanks to Taiwan. But the inputs to the Abrams tanks would probably go into things I would be an advocate of selling to Taiwan. And even aside from that, we've drawn down our arsenal. I think we've sent Ukraine a third of those portable anti-tank missiles that I'm sure I'll remember. The high bars? No, no, not those man portable, I can't remember what it's called, or things like stingers. We've sent down such a huge portion of our arsenal of those things, our stockpile of those things. So, and as we covered in an early episode, it's going to take years and years to replenish our stockpile just because it's going to take so long to do so. But those are things we can't sell or even just send to Taiwan in the event of an invasion or something like that. So there's these trade-offs that they don't want to admit. And you mentioned Himmars. A drill with Japan had to be canceled in January between the U.S. and Japan because there was not enough Himmar ammunition for the drill to take place. So the idea that, oh, what we're sending to Ukraine and oh, pivoting to Asia, those are two different things that don't have any bearing is just ludicrous nonsense that it betrays not understanding trade-offs and material realities of existence. Well, and this is just where a lot of people just go off the reservation claiming to be in favor of any sort of free market economics, but then somehow all the rules are suspended when it comes to defense spending. And that was an important point you raised there as well is that there's no market process that's actually working here. So unless you go over into full anarcho-capitalism, any sort of defense spending that is advocated is a completely arbitrary number that has just simply been made up by policymakers on guesses about what would be necessary and it has nothing to do with price allocation or anything like that. So you have to argue then that this amount of money you think should be spent is absolutely necessary. You don't have any market anything backing up your decision or your claim on that. So you can't claim that the market is on your side or some sort of free market notion dictates that you have to spend X amount of dollars. It's just not there. It's going to be arbitrary no matter what. Now you could say, well, we just have to live with that. That's the way it is. Okay, fine. But again, you're going to have to show that that money is prudent and also take into account all of the resources that are being sucked out of the private economy where the price allocation system actually does work. And you know, you brought up the issue of weapons manufacturing and all that. Mises has some interesting stuff on that. I believe it's in his short book. He's got a short book called Interventionism where he talks a little bit about what should be done with weapons manufacturer. He talks about the issue of how weapons manufacturers in Europe, they were stifled by price controls that were slapped on the weapons manufacturers. So he was saying that the ability to defend a regime against the Nazis and so on had been crippled by anti capitalist sentiment which had been designed to prevent quote, unquote profiteering by weapons manufacturers because they had been cranking out weapons but because the state was buying up more of them, they were increasing prices and then it's just so should you then slap price caps on weapons that are being produced by a private manufacturer. This is a real sticky issue when you get down to it. What is this intersection between private manufacturing and government purchases? It's not really a functioning market either because if your only clients are governments, where's the market? Which by the way applies to this dumb dominion lawsuit by this vote counting company or they act like they've been defamed. They're completely a government funded company. There's no market there. So yeah, none of this whole, oh, this poor private company has been badmouth, yeah, whatever. This is like claiming that some company that produces nukes is a private company, right? There's nothing going on there. I remember, I think it's in Hulsman's biography of Mises in the World War I period, Mises criticizes there's this like government policy. There were entrepreneurs in Austria-Hungary who started up firms and factories to produce ammunition in the calibers for weapons captured from the Russians. So this is entrepreneurial useful function and the government shut it down. I can't remember if it says why, but it's just here we actually, I think his point was the market is this weapon is a useful tool that by engaging in war socialism, we are making our ability to wage war less effective. And that was an example of utilizing the power of the market to aid in the war effort. And of course, the government quashed it. How many times have you heard that the government is in good at anything and messes up everything and can't be trusted with anything? But then when a war starts, suddenly the generals are geniuses who know exactly how to do everything just right. I mean, this is a line of thinking that we still have yet to overcome. I mean, I've had people who claim they're just like big time skeptics. They never believe anything the government says to them. But then the government told them one day that Iran was a bad country and should be sanctioned and invaded. And then they were 100% on board the next day. So this is, I think as long as that sort of thinking prevails, it's going to be very difficult to argue against this sort of military spending. But I think in the end, we're going to have to make very hard choices in terms of military spending because if this spending on the debt increases due to rising interest rates. So it's no big deal. It's basically free money. It really is free money to borrow when T-bills are at under 1% or something like that, right? I mean, you're just getting money. People are buying all your government debt. And what do you have to pay back on it? Almost nothing, a functionally negative interest. And so you can get away with that for a while and then make it seem like the latest war is no big deal. But when you start to get to a point where you're paying $800 billion, $900 billion in interest payments for the $32 trillion national debt, which of course is headed toward $50 trillion, as Janet Yellen admitted recently in the next 20 years, you're going to be paying a whole lot of money just out the door for nothing, for nothing in the present time. So all those Gen Zers are going to be paying through the nose for past wars that the US thought was a great idea. And I really don't see how they can push interest rates back down for such long periods of time without causing, of course, ongoing massive amounts of price inflation. So they're facing real costs. And that's something that's never mentioned in terms of military spending right now. They never include the proportion, the fraction of interest payments that came from defense spending originally. They don't even mention all the back pay, so to speak, that occurs in terms of caring for disabled veterans who were rendered crippled by these various wars. You got to pay for that. But of course, they could cut that money so they can pay for more F-35 stuff. And it's really despicable, really. But those are the decisions that are going to have to be made, because if you're going to come up and say, oh, we'll never cut Social Security in real terms, oh, well, we changed our mind. Now we do have to cut Social Security because now we have to pay $1.2 trillion in interest payments, and we just don't have the money for Social Security anymore. It's going to be really interesting to watch what the old timers have to say about that. Medicare also, of course. And they're just going to have to start cutting these other popular programs in order to keep up military spending if they want to keep it at the sorts of breakneck increases that they've got going right now. And you can't pretend that that sort of scarcity doesn't exist forever. We've been living in this period where we could pretend that was true because interest rates were so low. But there's going to be some coming ups and downs, or it might look like things are going down again. But in the long term, you can pick rising interest rates, or you can pick runaway inflation. And you're going to have to make a decision. And so you're going to be paying for all those wars one way or the other. And so pick your poison, really. We've been put in this position by all of this spending and by all this central bank buying up the debt, monetizing the debt, pushing down interest rates, creating basically a false economy around which all this has been created. And you can't keep it up forever. Wars do not actually help your economy. They destroy the economy. Just look at what happened to Britain after World War I and II. And Western Europe in general, they destroyed their economies with those wars. They would be so much richer now if they hadn't had those wars. They'd be richer than the U.S. still. But they decided to go with that. And you have to make those choices. And the U.S., the music is going to stop at some point, and you're going to have to find a chair. And not everyone's going to be able to find one. Yeah. On the point of veterans care, the Watson Institute estimates it's we're going to have $2.2 trillion in obligations for veterans care from the war on terror over the next 30 years. And also I should note for listeners, we're recording this on tax day. And as a self-employed person, I don't have any withholdings. I have to hand the check over to the government. It's quite sad to think, oh, it's just $100 billion to Ukraine. But when I'm writing the check of my income, it's sort of depressing when I think all the money I'll ever pay in taxes to the government, a thousandfold that has already been blown up in a Russian airstrike on some arms depot in Ukraine. It's just little, little salty about that today, especially. Well, yes, happy tax day to everyone. And that seems like a good place to end this discussion, just as a reminder of where all that money comes from for the next war. So thank you for listening to War Economy and Stay. We'll be back next time. Our plan is to cover the secrets and the prosecution over the latest leaks about Pentagon, Pentagon spending and the wars. And so hopefully we'll have everything we need to talk about that next time. And so thank you for listening. Have a great week.