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?

Ignoring whether or not it's achievable, pushing the US out of the "golden billion", would mean reducing it's average salary by *60%*. That's not $1700 a year anymore. That's on the order of $56k per person.

So, yes, sure, you can give Putin everything he wants. But if you do, you also have to bother to listen to what he's saying: his long-term *explicit* goal, at its maximalist position, would cost the average American 60% of your personal income.

It comes up a lot that Americans get confused what the "American interests" in the Ukraine war actually are. But that's the basic part of it.

Ignoring morality or principles or practicalities entirely, and going solely by Putin's own statements and pure dollars, that's what the war's maximalist position was, and why throwing merely double-digit billions to prevent it is *absurdly* cheap at the price.