$250 Billion Doesn't Buy What It Used To

Here’s a chart of the cost of American wars as percentage of GDP. As Hard Starboard puts it,

Turns out the cost to date of Operation Iraqi Freedom, as a percentage of GDP, is on a par with the Mexican War, Spanish-American War, and the 1991 Gulf War - a cumulative total of about 2% of a single year's GDP, or about $250 billion in today's dollars. This is in contrast to the War of 1812, Korea, and Vietnam (~10% of GDP), World War I (~25%), the Revolutionary War (~65%), the Civil War (~105%), or World War II (~130%).

(No future war will ever compare to WWII in dollar cost and lives lost. 1,020 Marines died taking some piece of crap atoll in the Pacific called Tarawa. Today we’d drop a fuel-air bomb, suffocate all the Japs and take the island with no casualties.)

(HT: Hard Starboard)