War isn’t cheap. The biggest costs of war inevitably involve the economically immeasurable toll of the lives lost.
The fallen not only represent generations of snuffed out potential themselves. They also leave behind swathes of forever altered survivors doomed to follow the unpredictable dictates of grief over the coming decades.
That being said, there is a large portion of the American public that does not seem to care about anything other than their own level of disposable income and that can’t think beyond the next news cycle. So, let’s consider the undeniable, immediate, financial impacts of this war in Iran that President Donald Trump has gotten us into.
The Pentagon has not yet released an official estimate of the cost to U.S. taxpayers for the war against Iran. When the Pentagon does release an official estimate, I wouldn’t necessarily trust it given that Trump lackey Pete Hegseth is at the helm there.
However, a few days ago two congressional sources told media outlets that the war has been costing taxpayers an estimated $1 billion every day. One day after that initial estimate was released, reporting indicated that Republicans on Capital Hill had privately expressed fears that the U.S. is actually spending more like $2 billion every day to blow people up in Iran.
Experts apparently agree that while American military costs could climb to $2 billion per day in the early days of a war like the one the U.S. just launched against Iran, ongoing costs are more likely to settle around the $1 billion per day figure. We’ll work with the more conservative assumption and estimate that this war is costing the U.S. $1 billion a day.
March has 31 days. Whatever lies Trump tells about this war being over quickly in his attempts to calm the markets, I guarantee that, here in reality, the war is not going to be over by the end of the month. We’ll all be spending at least $31 billion on the Iran war in March.
Every year, of the 168 million or so individual income tax returns filed, about 112 million show at least some taxable income (those who don’t owe any income tax often do pay other taxes, like those to fund Medicare and Social Security, but they are not directly funding military spending in the same way an income taxpayer is). Of course, though some taxpayers pay much more than others depending on their respective levels of income, for the sake of this exercise we are going to consider the “average” taxpayer.
So, $31 billion to fund war against Iran this month divided amongst the 112 million individual income tax payers in this country results in an individual bill to every single American taxpayer of $276.79. I don’t know about you, but I can think of a lot of other things I’d like to spend $276.79 on this month that are not blowing up a girls’ elementary school or mistakenly shooting down three of our own fighter jets.
I can’t imagine that people who were whining about a carton of eggs going up in price by a dollar two years ago would be alright with incinerating close to $300 of their own money this month to fund a senseless war that we did not have to fight. And that $276.79 that the average taxpayer is spending in Iran this month is only to account for the direct military costs of things like missiles, fuel, and a variety of operating expenses for wildly inefficient military hardware. The figure does not include the many ancillary financial impacts of the war, like gas prices spiking by more than 50 cents a gallon over the course of only a single week.
It probably won’t matter, but hey, it’s worth a shot: If you haven’t cut your Trump-loving family members out of your life yet, try pointing out to them how they each just spent $276.79 this month on a spontaneous war against a country they probably couldn’t find on an unlabeled map of the earth. At the end of the day, $276.79 could still buy a hell of a lot of eggs.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
The post You, The Average American Taxpayer, Individually Spent $276.29 This Month To Fund The War Against Iran appeared first on Above the Law.