Tucker Carlson Iran war cost estimate
by Jolyon: Tucker Carlson
The $72 billion figure for the first 60 days of the Iran war is Stephen Semler's own estimate, and he's upfront that it doesn't reach the wider economic fallout. What it does tally: combat operations, restocking the munitions that got used, fixing up bases that took hits, and money sent to Israel. Beyond that, Semler pulls in a Moody's analysis pointing to roughly $2,000 in extra costs per American household, driven by fuel getting more expensive and the war pushing inflation upward. His sharper charge is aimed at the Pentagon, which he says holds back a full accounting and leaves major expenses off what it does publish. Which loops back to Tucker Carlson's question about the real price tag for Americans, and a public ledger that seems to stop short. TCNetwork, writer Sol.
Transcript (en)
Let's discuss the totality of the cost. And I think you just named the big drivers of the cost. It's not simply the defense budget or whatever additional funding they're going to require to backfill all the munitions that they blew doing what I'm not sure, but it's also the cost in inflation. Summarize and then dig into, if you would, the costs. So I pay attention to the narrow set of costs called direct war costs, which are the immediate budgetary expenses from the war that the U.S. is on the hook for. The broader costs, the indirect war costs, refer to the costs of the economy. So there was a Moody's analysis, I think, that found that the average household paid $2,000 more as a result of the war, mostly due to inflation, higher fuel costs, and that sort of thing. I pay attention to the numbers that the Pentagon is supposed to faithfully report, and the U.S. government is supposed to faithfully report regarding the war's current costs, especially the Pentagon. But the Pentagon has refused to provide those numbers. So that they provide a top line number that dubious The most detail they provided at least publicly is a summary table which left a lot of stuff out It didn count the cost of replacing bases for example It didn't count the cost of moving money around in the Pentagon budget to pay for war operations that would have gone to something else or would have gone unused. So that has opened up the space for independent analysts to assess the cost of the Iran war. And for the first 60 days of the Iran war, I estimated that it cost $72 billion in direct costs between operations, between replacing the munitions that were expended, damage to U.S. military bases, and military aid to Israel. So taking those costs into account, I arrived at $72 billion for the first 60 days. Then the next month, the Trump administration requested an $87 billion supplemental funding bill, which is literally money supplemental to the main budget that Congress approves every year for Iran, mostly for Iran war related expenses.
