{"id":2703,"date":"2023-05-22T19:57:14","date_gmt":"2023-05-22T17:57:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dhcab.com\/?p=2703"},"modified":"2023-05-22T19:57:14","modified_gmt":"2023-05-22T17:57:14","slug":"us-addiction-to-war-led-to-its-debt-crisis-academic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dhcab.com\/?p=2703","title":{"rendered":"US ‘addiction to war’ led to its debt crisis: Academic"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The way to reign in the persisting US debt crisis is to “stop America’s wars of choice and slash its military outlays,” a US-based author-academic and former United Nations official has emphasized in an article.
“To surmount the debt crisis, America needs to stop feeding the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC), the most powerful lobby in Washington,” Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs wrote in an article published Saturday by the progressive Common Dreams news outlet, insisting that the MIC has led the US into “disastrous wars of choice” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and now Ukraine, since 2000.
“Afghanistan was America\u2019s cause from 2001 to 2021, until the US left it broken, bankrupt, and hungry. Ukraine is now in America\u2019s embrace, with the same likely results: ongoing war, death, and destruction.”
In addition to ending America\u2019s wars of choice, the article further called for the closure of “many of America\u2019s 800 or so military bases around the world”, and “negotiating new arms control agreements” to avoid nearly a quarter of America\u2019s annual military spending.
The article also underlined that those wars of choice have not been only “awful” for America, but they have also been “far greater disasters” for countries that America purports to be saving.
Noting that the US government debt climbed from $3.5 trillion (or 35% of the Gross Domestic Product) in 2000 to $24 trillion (or 95% of GDP) in 2022, the article emphasized the way to tackle the current debt crisis would be to “stop America’s wars of choice,” slash its monumental military spending, and replace them with real diplomacy.
According to the article, today\u2019s debt would have been $9 trillion, if the government\u2019s debt had remained at a modest 35% of GDP as in 2000, and that the excess $15 trillion in debt incurred by the government is mainly caused by “the US government\u2019s addiction to war and military spending.”
It cited a study by the Watson Institute at Brown University that found that the cost of US wars from fiscal year 2001 to fiscal year 2022 amounted to a whopping $8 trillion, more than half of the extra $15 trillion in debt.
America\u2019s annual military spending is now around $900 billion.\u00a0roughly 40% of the world’s total and greater than the next 10 countries combined, the article further emphasized.
It added: “The US military spending in 2022 was triple that of China. According to Congressional Budget Office, the\u00a0military outlays for 2024-2033\u00a0will be a staggering $10.3 trillion on current baseline. A quarter or more of that could be avoided by ending America\u2019s wars of choice, closing down many of America\u2019s 800 or so military bases around the world, and negotiating new arms control agreements with China and Russia.”
The article also insisted that military spending is not the only budget challenge for the US, pointing to aging and rising healthcare costs as other fiscal woes.
It then cited the Congressional Budget Office\u00a0as noting that US debt will reach\u00a0185 percent of GDP by 2052\u00a0if current policies remain unchanged. Healthcare costs, it argued, should be capped while taxes on the rich should be raised.
The article\u00a0concluded by insisting that “facing down the military-industrial lobby is the vital first step to putting America\u2019s fiscal house in order —\u00a0needed to save the US, and possibly the world, from America\u2019s perverse lobby-driven politics.”<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The way to reign in the persisting US debt crisis is to “stop America’s wars of choice and slash its military outlays,” a US-based author-academic and former United Nations official has emphasized in an article.“To surmount the debt crisis, America needs to stop feeding the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC), the most powerful lobby in Washington,” Columbia […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2704,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-global-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dhcab.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dhcab.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dhcab.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dhcab.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dhcab.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.dhcab.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2703\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dhcab.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dhcab.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dhcab.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dhcab.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}