Gonna write this up in longer form, but folks complaining that the $45bn Ukraine costs are high miss two key points:

1. The direct costs in (US) military aid are surprisingly small; in the order of $19bn this year, and $10.8bn committed (so far) for next year

2. The indirect economic costs of the Russian war to the US economy (i.e. to the private sector not via the government) are in the order of $600-700bn per year. To pick a random company, it's nearly $6-10bn in costs to Apple *alone*.

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?

Anyway, that's why it's super disingenuous for folks to say the numbers are way too big. Yes, the direct costs are large. But if you take it as an investment into ending the war sooner, and looking at the indirect costs, it quickly looks insanely small for what it's trying to achieve.
So this type of argument comes up a lot. Let's take Putin at his word of what it means for his success, because his success was not defined solely in terms of Ukraine. It was defined in terms of partitioning the global economy and setting up a major new economic group including China and railing against the US/EU as part of the "golden billion" https://infosec.exchange/@frontier/109564875467342115
frontier (@[email protected])

@[email protected] if we didn’t give any assistance to Ukraine the war would have been over much sooner, likely this spring. In fact isn’t the strategy here to bleed the Russians out? To turn it into a war of attrition for them?

Infosec Exchange

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.

@Pwnallthethings Bastard is going for the Baltics next. Stopping him now is much cheaper--in lives as well as money.
@markvonwahlde @Pwnallthethings I often wonder (and I’ve wondered the same thing about DJT), whether his influence would survive him. That is to say, if he met an “unexpected” end, would that solve more problems than it caused? Maybe it’s the media’s coverage of the story, but it sounds like Putin doesn’t have a ton of support for this war.
@dj @Pwnallthethings I analogize Russia to a medieval fiefdom. So long as Putin has the support of his liege lords, he's good. Public opinion is only important insofar as it influences the status of Putin's kleptocratic nobility. In the future, public opinion could shift so that Putin's nobility may move to influence events (or fall out of windows). It is difficult to come to a clear opinion.
@markvonwahlde @Pwnallthethings I definitely agree with the analogy, but the thing I wonder is if his lieutenants are invested enough in his mission that they’d carry it on in the event of his demise? Sure, he’s got some oligarch buddies who stand to lose a lot if he’s removed from power, but these guys didn’t get to where they are by putting all of their eggs in one basket.
It seems to me that much of what Putin’s doing is an ego play. Sure, you could make the argument that there are economic benefits to regaining control over the Ukraine, but I think the financial and human costs (I know, Putin only cares about the former) have been so great that it’s long past the point of diminishing return. So, with that in mind, is there anybody else who’d have anything to gain by carrying the torch?
Seems to me that the best move for (the rest of) Russia right now is to depose (by whatever definition) Putin, and have the next person pull Russia out of Ukraine. That way, nobody loses face (except for Putin, who’d now be irrelevant). They’ve gotta know that they’re in a conflict that they can’t win, and that the response from the international community will keep squeezing them tighter and tighter. As for China, Russia’s so oversubscribed militarily and economically that there’s not much that they can offer China as far as a “golden billion” deal is concerned. About the only thing they have at this point, is oil. But even that’s an investment of diminishing return, given the fact that the world has more or less absorbed the gap left by not buying Russian oil, not to mention the fact that oil is going to become more of a niche power source as alternative power sources become more efficient and pervasive.
In this armchair-king-of-the-world’s opinion, Russia doesn’t have much in the way of options.
@dj @Pwnallthethings Yeah, Putin has painted himself into a corner. Czars would die at the hands of their nobility, and Putin is transparently afraid of that end. The fear of catastrophic uncertainty is Putin's ally. Things could get really messy in a power vacuum.