Ukraine aid's best-kept secret: Most of the money stays in the USA

How can you be so sure? What if they came out of schools into their first job? Now those people get training, and some skills in their resume for the future.

Honestly, your entire comment reads very FUDy and lacking in proof/substance.

We are having our cake (pumping cash into our defense industry) and eating it to (replenishing aging arsenals, advertising to prospective arm buyers, get invaluable real-world data on how our weapons work, decimating the military of a chief geopolitical rival).

There is no downside here form the US perspective. Every dollar spent is returned in ways that no other expenditure could replicate.

This effect is so negligible it’s not even worth calling out.

>But then all those resulting weapons and tanks are being sent to Ukraine. They're not staying in the USA.

They don't need to stay in the USA. Most of those weapons systems are not even particularly relevant to the US' needs right now. Some are even literally expired, or near their expiration date.

The US has thousands of tanks and thousands of armored fighting vehicles stockpiled as well as thousands of MRAPs left over from various occupations in the Middle East. Not only do we not need more of them, but those weapons were designed, and built, primarily to counter a scenario in which Russia (/ USSR) invaded Europe. And that's now happening. They will be of very little use in the Pacific, and will be of no use whatsoever if they just sit in the desert for another 20 years.

So if you want to talk about opportunity costs, that should be part of the calculation.

> And all those extra workers that have been hired? Well, they came from working on other things. Things that aren't getting done anymore -- or the people that replaced some of them came from yet other things that now aren't getting done, that aren't benefiting people and businesses in the US.

Wrong. People, and jobs, are not 100% liquid. People doing manufacturing jobs can't immediately retrain to be software engineers. And I don't know if you've noticed, but there are a lot of people who worked in manufacturing struggling to get by in an economy that has globalized manufacturing out of the US.

You may have also heard that the US is now trying to get repatriate some of that critical manufacturing back to the US. Defense spending is a good way to keep those skills and supply chains viable.

> So no, there's no reasonable sense in which the money is "staying in the USA", in the sense of having our cake and eating it too. It's being spent on hardware that is sent to Ukraine. And we are losing out on all of the products and services that we would have built instead. All of that value is gone. Because it got shipped to Ukraine instead.

Since you're so interested in opportunity costs, how about we have a discussion about the opportunity costs of allowing Russia to successfully invade their neighbors? The political opportunity costs of failing to help a nation which we had strongarmed into giving up their nuclear weapons in the 1990s, and the subsequent risk of increased nuclear proliferation? The opportunity costs of dealing with the situation now rather than later, with more land and population at their disposal (1938 Czechoslovakia says hello)?

This is a rare occurrence of a scenario where it is in our interests to help Ukraine, while being the moral thing to do, while also being an insanely efficient use of resources comparatively speaking. Certainly far moreso than the 20 years spent in the middle east.

It is clear that our 155mm production sucks and that 155mm shells are needed in large numbers in a peer contest.

Building 155mm capacity is itself beneficial, in that we are learning how to build more production lines and learn how to ramp.

No amount of money is 'useful' per se. What we care about the skills of our workers to reliably and consistently perform in these production lines.

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We get the best of both worlds. We can practice and ramp up production, building the production skills. But it's the Ukrainians who are putting their lives on the line. A bit grim, but this is very beneficial to us.

I'm not sure why the end product of economic activity has to physically stay in the country to be beneficial. In the case of Ukraine, the US government spending money to build say anti-tank missiles and stockpiling them locally is arguably much less beneficial to the US than spending money to build anti-tank missiles and giving them to Ukrainians to use to blow up Russian tanks. Nobody is mounting a tank invasion of the US, but spending money to wreck one of the two major US adversaries is a pretty good return on investment in my book.

You're right that spending money on war in general is a great example of the broken window fallacy, but that has nothing to do with where the tanks you're building end up. It would be the same economic problem if it was a war being fought in the US or with the US as a direct participant. Everybody would have been better off economically if the Russians had stayed in their own country, but they didn't.

The fact that the goods are exported is not relevant. Many goods are exported. Missiles, sure, but also food. Is exporting food a broken window fallacy? Obviously not.

The US has an immense economic competitive advantage in military goods owing to its technology. It’s a product like any other and the wages that flow through this industry as well as its suppliers are huge net positives to the overall economy.

Selling that which you have a competitive advantage on and buying the rest is the basic principle behind international economics.

Whoop de do. The US, Western and Eastern European countries are using their market economies to build weapons to send to Ukraine or replace stocks of weapons also sent to Ukraine. And they'll keep doing that until either Russia gives up or implodes. If the author hates that he should come out and say he wants Russia to annex Ukraine.

You also may not realize the level of antipathy toward sending aid to Ukraine that exists here in the US, particularly by Republicans. People here seem to think that we are sending all this money to Ukraine, personally enriching Zelensky. A lot of this is Russian propaganda that has filtered into US conservative media, sometimes direct from RT.