Trump’s Foreign Adventures Will Cost Taxpayers Billions

From Bloomberg

Donald Trump clearly relishes sending the US military to flex his prerogatives around the world. He removed Venezuela’s president and has hinted he’d do the same in Colombia, suggested he’ll deploy troops to hunt drug cartels inside Mexico, vowed to seize control of Greenland “whether they like it or not,” put himself at the center of Gaza’s uneasy future, escalated his pressure campaign on Iran’s embattled regime and boasted about a plan to go into Nigeria “guns-a-blazing.” 

Yet Trump has been comparatively quiet about how much his ever-multiplying foreign adventures will cost—and who’ll get stuck with the bill.

In the end, the Iraq War cost about $4.5 trillion, Bilmes calculates, much of it stacked onto the national debt. And that’s a conservative estimate. Add in the ongoing cost of health-care and disability benefits for war veterans and decades of payments to service that debt, and Peltier puts the true cost to taxpayers at around $8 trillion and counting.

Bush’s willingness to finance a lot of those war costs has been adopted by his successors, who no longer feel compelled to ask Americans to sacrifice for the sake of the nation’s foreign policy aims. Last century’s presidents raised taxes to pay for conflicts abroad; Bush and Trump both presided over tax cuts in the same years they commanded strikes.