How The Iran War Budget Should Be Spent

Indexé : 2026-05-22

[00:00:02]All right, let's get straight to the point. We are still at war.

[00:00:06]>> War is likely to resume and the rift between the US and its allies appears to be growing.

[00:00:11]>> And among the many reasons why that sucks, one major thing about war is the billions of dollars going to drones, ships, and now AI companies that'll give us minutes like these.

[00:00:34]We are going to pay a hell of a lot every single day for the next who knows both economically and with real human lives.

[00:00:47]So, with so much up in the air right now, we thought we'd make a quick video to find out just how much it's all going to add up to, then do a little math to see how we could have spent that money instead.

[00:01:01]Let's talk about what we know already.

[00:01:04]The first week in Iran racked up an 11.3 billion bill in munitions alone. Every day since has been an extra two billion on the pile. That is an insane amount of money, and it's going to get a lot worse.

[00:01:21]Just a month into the Iraq war, Bush revealed it had already cost the US $20 billion, or about $690 million a day. By that point, we'd been in Afghanistan for 2 years with no end in sight. But Bush was confident that Iraq would only take another 5 months or so and 20 billion more. So 40 billion total.

[00:01:40]>> We must stop the terror. Now watch this drive.

[00:01:45]>> Except four years later, as Bush was getting ready to leave office, we were still in Iraq. We were still in Afghanistan. And Dubia was going to Congress asking for an extra 190 billion to keep everything going. It was only 20 years later we finally got the real price tag of the war on terror. 14 trillion.

[00:02:08]The Pentagon spent $14 trillion between 2001 and 2021, about 8 trillion of which went to the 9/11 wars specifically. That is more than the wealth of all these billionaires combined. And we can say with confidence that that money was well and truly wasted. Between 30% and half of the 14 trillion went straight to just five companies. Loheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Rathon, and Northrup Grumman. The rest was spent mostly on things like taking care of veterans poorly for what it's worth, and paying back the war debt with interest, which has already added a full trillion dollars to the bill. And for what? The Taliban went from being in charge to still being in charge. Millions of people died. The US is despised by an entire region and much of the world. And it didn't prevent any new wars from breaking out. For more on that last point, see any news at all.

[00:03:07]All right, quick plug, then we'll get back to it. As always, want to respect your time, so here's a time stamp to skip ahead if you're not interested or not able to support the channel. I've said this before, but it's worth repeating. This show runs on viewer support. That's just the reality of doing this kind of work. There aren't a lot of companies lining up to fund openly socialist content. And even when they do, that's not something I want to depend on long term because at the end of the day, if your funding comes from corporations, there's always going to be pressure there. And sometimes it's subtle, sometimes it's really not, but it's never on your terms. So, the alternative is pretty straightforward.

[00:03:47]If we want this kind of content to exist, it has to be supported directly by the people who actually watch it. If you're in a position to help out, Patreon is the easiest way to do that.

[00:03:57]You get some nice perks, too, including early access to adree versions of every video and access to our patrons only Discord server complete with book club.

[00:04:05]And then there's Means TV, which I've been really working hard to help build these last couple years. Means is a workerowned streaming platform. That means no ads, no corporate oversight, just normal people trying to build something that actually reflects the politics we talk about here. I've been posting some extra stuff there already, including like 15 minutes of extra content for every single video. And we have some bigger projects on the way, too. Now, no pressure, obviously. Um, watching and sharing the videos helps a lot on its own, but if you do want to go a step further and help make sure that Second Thought stays afloat, these are the best ways to do it. For those of you who are already supporting us financially and those who are on the fence, thank you so much. It really does mean the world to us. All right, that's it. Back to the video.

[00:04:53]So, okay, let's imagine that we could learn from history and not throw another 14 extra big ones down the drain. How would we spend that money? Because we do have money problems these days. About a third of us are skipping meals to afford healthcare. So, let's start there. What would it cost to just fix that?

[00:05:13]Shockingly, only 290 billion per year max. That's it. That's what universal healthcare would cost us at the very most. For context, Trump just requested that the Pentagon's budget be up to 1.5 trillion per year. Meaning we could give the war budget a 20% haircut, still be miles ahead of every other country militarily, and not starve ourselves for aspirin. Universal health care is the norm in every single wealthy country and in many less wealthy countries in the global south. It's a system that makes sure that anybody, regardless of how much they make or what they're going through, can see a doctor and get their prescriptions filled at no or very low cost. If that sounds insane to you, it's the norm for billions of people worldwide.

[00:06:03]Universal healthcare works by saving billions of dollars by eliminating price gouging and the need for useless insurance middlemen whose only job is to deny our claims. Here in the US, getting universal healthcare would mean no more medical bankruptcy, something that half a million Americans deal with every year and that affects exactly one country, the United States. For 30% of us, universal healthcare would literally be the difference between getting a life-saving procedure and eating that day. And that $290 billion figure is just the worst case scenario.

[00:06:41]According to a painfully thorough Congressional Budget Office report, four out of five universal healthcare proposals currently on the table would actually save Americans between 42 and $743 billion a year. We'd only add to the budget if we chose the fifth option, which makes it a priority to pay providers and drug companies a lot, doing low cost sharing for individuals, and covering long-term support and services. In every other proposal, including Bernie's Medicare for all, we save money. But if we really wanted to spend on healthcare, since that is the point of this video, we could always just pay for people's medical debt and cancel all of it. That would only be a onetime $220 billion fee and it wouldn't even make a dent in the Pentagon budget.

[00:07:29]How many of you watching are struggling with medical debt? How does it make you feel that our government could just pay it all off with the stroke of a pen, but they won't? Sorry, that money spoken for. Got to kill a bunch of school kids halfway around the world.

[00:07:44]Does that make your life better? No. H.

[00:07:48]So, what else could we do? Let's do something fun and notoriously expensive like highspeed rail.

[00:07:56]While countries like France, Japan, China all get to enjoy convenient cross-country travel on bullet trains from the future, we are stuck waiting 5 hours at TSA because it's too expensive.

[00:08:07]So, let's imagine that tomorrow Congress suddenly went crazy. Let's imagine they decided enough was enough and we should replace the entire Amtrak network with highspeed rail. This is not something anybody's asking for. It is not something that makes sense. Every single HSR plan is way more conservative in terms of scale, but let's just be wild.

[00:08:29]At roughly $130 million per kilometer, according to this graph in Financial Times, the California highspeed rail IOS is one of the most expensive highspeed rail projects we have in the US. If we were to match the 21,000 mi of Amtrak lines and build a highspeed rail network of that length at the California HSR costs, the total would still only be $4.4 trillion. It would cost half as much as 20 years of war in the Middle East.

[00:08:58]Just imagine those 20 years could have been spent very differently and by the end of it we wouldn't have millions of abandoned and suicidal veterans, millions of deaths and cities all over the world reduced to rubble. We would have a completely transformed country we could actually travel around in. Again, I'm not saying this is a reasonable project. I'm saying that we could have handed the dot over to a co-dub yimi numat with a blank check in 2001 and still have ended up with a more sensible spending program than the Pentagon. I think you get the idea. So, let's just do a couple more quick ones. Head Start, free preschool for low-income kids, is only $12 billion a year. Cancer research, 7 billion from Congress a year. Solving homelessness, 9.6 billion.

[00:09:44]These are all large sums of money, but they are pocket change compared to what we spend killing civilians abroad. We could double, triple, quadruple any of those amounts, and the military wouldn't even notice a difference. Even big ticket items like free higher education, a plan that would completely eliminate costs at 4-year public colleges, would only run 70 billion a year. Even truly ambitious projects like ending world hunger are estimated by the UN to only cost $93 billion. 25 times more money goes missing from the Pentagon's balance sheets every year. Look, the point isn't to say that there's no room in this world for countries to spend on their military, but when just five companies get trillions while people starve, our priorities just aren't set right.

[00:10:35]And I have trouble believing that those priorities are being set with us in mind when those same five companies spend $2.5 billion dollar hiring 700 lobbyists.

[00:10:48]They need wars. We don't. We need good jobs, health care, education, housing, clean air, public transportation, all things that can be tackled given an appropriate budget. But no budget like that is ever going to be written so long as we put war criminals in charge. It's time for the gloves to come off.

[00:11:07]Friends, I'm going to speak to you as plainly as I can here. My fellow Americans, look, I I don't know where you fall on the political spectrum. We may disagree on just about everything, but I don't think we disagree on this. Everyone, every doctor and waitress, every hairdresser and soldier, every musician and manager, they all know things are getting worse. We feel it every day. We feel it in the potholes on our daily commute, in our rent and mortgage payments at the end of each month. We feel it in the medical bills no other country has to pay. We feel it in the disregard for our homeless, our elderly, our children. Every aspect of our lives is getting worse. And for what? For what? So the people in power can stay in power? So lobbyists can get jobs in government and politicians can get jobs as lobbyists in an endless cycle of screwing the little guy who exists in a completely different world and has to play by an entirely different set of rules. I don't know about you, but none of my friends and co-workers are on Epstein's list. A whole lot of the people in charge are. There is no reason that we should put up with this country becoming a complete hell hole for 99.9% of us for the sake of, let's be honest here, geriatric bureaucrats, billionaire psychopaths, and unaccountable alleged pedophiles. There is no reason we should allow these freaks to kill our fellow human beings all over the planet for the sake of their wallets. The people they're killing have done nothing to deserve their murder. And even if they were bad people, what gives a country halfway around the world the right to violate their airspace, invade their country, and kill their men, women, and children indiscriminately? So, let's be selfish and say, "Hey, that's our money you're using to kill those people. Spend it on us instead."

[00:13:03]Are there more principled arguments to make? Yes. Will this one resonate with the average American? Absolutely. I think it's the only one that will. We have seen this time and again. What that says about us as a society, that's for you to decide. But the bottom line is this. If a mass of Americans say enough is enough, stop screwing us so you can play world police, that will materially benefit both our families and the families on the other side of the world, staring down the barrel of US guns for no godamn reason except to keep the rich and powerful, rich and powerful. This country is not what we have been told it is. It's time to wake up and realize that