In other words, if the US upped it's spend by, say, 25% and that reduced the length of the war by *just a whole week*, it would *make money*.

It's a good example of how the size of war economics harms get truly insane really quickly, and get you to unintuitive places about just how much of the war costs end up as indirect, rather than direct costs.

Or if you want it put another way, every American is spending in the order of $50 a year in direct lethal assistance to Ukraine, but losing about $1700 a year in indirect economic costs caused by that war.

If you had a company that sold a widget that upped a business cost from $50 to, let's say, $100, but doing so saved the customer $1700 a year, how quickly do you think VCs in Silicon Valley would jump in to invest in that widget?

Economic costs get into stratospheric numbers when you start looking at global dampening effects, and get really hard for the human brain to comprehend. So you end up having to do the translation into comprehendible numbers.

So if you want to put it another way, the indirect costs of the Ukraine war is equivalent to, say, 6 million American jobs a year.

How much would Congress pay in subsidies to get 6 million people into new jobs? Idk. But $45bn sounds super cheap at those scales.

Taking OECD numbers of the cost of the war at 3% of global GDP, give or take, and assuming that's uniformly spread globally, ending the war would *double* US GDP growth.

So why is the US investing only $10.8bn of lethal aid next year into getting that to happen sooner?

@Pwnallthethings Can you provide a source for that? Russia has given loads of contradictory arguments for the invasion but the most plausible casus belli seems to be Ukraine's interest in joining the EEA, which would mean not joining Russia's economic area. But framing the expansion of the Russo-Chinese economic area as the decimation of the greater EEA (including the US, etc) seems a bit sensationalist given that members of this trading block heavily depend on trading with the other block.

China also seems to be quite happily expanding its own area of economic influence in Asia and Africa and elsewhere and not exactly be very excited to support Russia in this conflict.

In addition Putin has expressed interest in redrawing Russia's borders to include much of the prior USSR and the Russian Empire, well into NATO and EU territory. Not through economic expansion but political infiltration and blunt military force. That seems a better argument as to why Russia needs to stop.