You know I am a sucker for these sorts of infographics:
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Chart courtesy of NYT
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Source:
The War: A Trillion Can Be Cheap
ELISABETH BUMILLER
NYT, July 24, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/weekinreview/25bumiller.html
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
"Overall household indebtedness is up from $7 trillion to almost $10 trillion since 2000. On this sum, we estimate, the American consumer has an annual interest bill of more than $500 billion; a sum, by the way, that vastly exceeds his current income growth." —Kurt Richebacher
"The Greek offer is not sufficient and they have to go away to come up with a revised plan," said a spokesman for the German Finance Ministry. The Greeks must first have a plan that satisfies the Germans which this comment states they clearly don't yet and then the Greek Parliament will vote on it this weekend. This said, whatever package gets voted on in Greece is basically an up or down vote on euro membership so we are entering another uncertain weekend for global markets. A failed vote will likely lead to a hard default which may be what...
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July 27th, 2010 at 3:37 pm
I’d like to see the number of people fighting in each war as a percent of the US population at the time.
These numbers are shocking, esp to see the cost of WW II. How much of that went to the USSR?
July 27th, 2010 at 3:42 pm
We sure fight a lot of unnecessary wars!
July 27th, 2010 at 8:29 pm
I recall reading somewhere that, at the end of WWII, we were launching one fleet carrier a month and one escort carrier a *week*! That’s one small example of how much we were building for the war.
July 27th, 2010 at 10:40 pm
This is a terribly misleading chart. This is why we can’t as a society make any rational decisions anymore. The only meaningful part of this chart is the last part adjusted by GDP.
Stop abusing the meaning of numbers!!! Why is the GDP adjusted number for the iraq war left out? How can one even think of putting up two charts for comparison with different data points!!! Don’t expect the reader to adjust for the discrepancy. Report good meaningful data or don’t show it!
July 29th, 2010 at 5:44 pm
advsys is right. The war is way too INEXPENSIVE, as the last chart shows. Productivity is up everywhere including war, and that is why we have so much unemployment. Nothing for people to do. If Bush was still in office, we might be on our way to Tehran by now, and that would do wonders for unemployment.
August 11th, 2010 at 6:02 pm
@bonzo:
How true. If we measure our country’s health by GDP, then by all means borrow money to create assets and destroy them. Plus make sure you kill formerly healthy productive young men and women because we don’t need their productive capacity in the future. They would just come home and increase the unemployment figures anyway. Yep, war is great for GDP, and GDP is all that matters.