2011: $855,022,000,000
2012: $807,530,000,000
2013: $745,416,000,000
2014: $699,564,000,000
2015: $683,678,000,000
2016: $681,580,000,000
2017: $674,557,000,000
2018: $694,860,000,000
2019: $734,344,000,000
2020: $766,583,000,000
Analysts have been consistently telling us for years now that there is another $500 billion or so not being counted in each of these numbers. Some $200 billion or so is spread across numerous departments, plus secret agencies, but clearly military expenses, including the expense of arming for free and training the militaries of brutal foreign governments. Another $100 to $200 billion or so is debt payments for past military expenses. The other $100 billion or more is the cost of caring for veterans; and, while most wealthy nations provide comprehensive healthcare to everyone, were the U.S. to do that as a majority of people in the U.S. favor the fact would remain that care for veterans is made vastly more costly by their war injuries. In addition, those costs can continue for several decades after the wars.
The total of just the numbers from SIPRI above, which do not include 2021, is $14,259,051,000,000. That's $14 trillion, with a T.
If we were to take the extra $500 billion a year and call it $400 billion to be safe, and multiply it by 20 years, that would be an additional $8 trillion, or a grand total of $22 trillion spent thus far.
You'll read reports declaring the cost of the wars of these years to be some fraction of that, such as $6 trillion, but this is accomplished by normalizing much military spending, treating it as somehow for something other than wars.
According to the calculations of economists, money invested in education (to take one example of a number of sectors considered) creates 138.4 percent as many jobs as investing the same money in militarism. So, purely in economic terms, the benefits of having done something wiser with the $22 trillion is worth more than just $22 trillion.
Beyond economics is the fact that less than 3 percent of this money could have ended starvation on earth and a bit over 1 percent could have ended the lack of clean drinking water on earth. That's just scratching the surface of the costs of the spending, which has killed more by not being spent usefully than by being spent on war.
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