Trump’s massive increases in military spending, leading to the recent creation of a 6th branch of the US military dubbed the “Space Force” has to be the most socioeconomically destructive thing going on IN THE ENTIRE PLANET! And to add insult to injury, America’s clueless economics establishment encourages such disastrous spending. Trump should be called “the bin Laden President” because regardless of his good intentions he is destroying the United States via military spending exactly as Osama bin Laden hoped. bin Laden must be in heaven(well, not really but let’s go along) screwing his dark-eyed virgins with unimaginable ecstasy and excitement as he sees his military strategy of bankrupting his enemies (Russia and the USA) being implemented beautifully by the economically ignorant and tribalistic Trump.

A simple economic concept which can be easily explained in one paragraph is all we need to understand why most military spending is so horrendous. Every living order, whether it’d be a single cell, or a collection of them like a human being, or a collection of humans like a company, is in a constant cycle of production and consumption. A surgeon produces wealth in terms of surgeries which he exchanges for money which he then exchanges for the wealth he consumes in terms of housing, energy, food, etc. Production increases the world’s economic pie of wealth and order, while consumption reduces it. If the government taxes people and uses the money to hire 100 laborers to work on digging holes and then refill them, the laborers have not produced or increased the economic pie by anything of value, yet they trade their wages for, and then consumed, cars, energy, food, etc. (civilian goods that lead to life/enjoyment) leading to an obvious net shrinking of the economic pie to the great detriment of the taxpayers who were deprived of their wealth. It is vitally important to realize that just because people are working and buying or consuming wealth does NOT mean that their actions are leading to socioeconomic growth. As this last hole-digging example shows, it could lead to a shrinking of the economic pie. Economic activity must be coordinated in a way that leads to more production than consumption. Easy and obvious right? As unbelievable as this might sound, if you truly understand this, you already have a far superior understanding of economics than the USA’s mainstream economics establishment.

Every year, over one trillion dollars worth of civilian wealth in terms of homes, cars, energy, medicines, etc., (an amount similar to the entire productive output of Mexico which has the world’s 15th largest economy at $1.04 trillion GDP), is consumed from the economic pie by the millions of people employed by the national security bureaucracy and its associated contractors as they produce push-ups, military drills and weapons of destruction. In other words, there is a MASSIVE consumption of real useful wealth and an increase of push-ups, military drills/patrols, weapons of destruction which in no way directly improve the lives of Americans. It is as if Americans were forced to trade the extra restaurant meals, leisure time, medical care, tennis lessons, etc. they worked so hard to afford, for watching people do push-ups, fly jets, build nukes. Should the USA be invaded, the production of the aforementioned would have been well worth the trillion dollars worth of wealth consumed, but since there is virtually 0 chance of anyone attempting this and not being completely bankrupted by the attempt, the push-ups, drills and weapons are worthless. It is like boarding up and evacuating an entire state every year when summer comes because of fear of a potential hurricane you can easily detect weeks in advanced and properly prepare for. It is a complete waste of wealth.

The economic damage by America’s trillion dollar military is simply astounding. In 2015, the world’s ten biggest corporations as measured by the amount of research and development spending they undertook, companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Volkswagen and six others, consumed about 109 billion dollars as they sustained some of the brightest and most productive people in the world whose innovations are truly transforming the world right before our eyes. The National Security bureaucracy consumes that much wealth in less than 1.5 months. For every dollar that sustains the wonderful research and innovations they create, nine dollars worth of wealth are consumed and used to sustain people whose jobs ultimately add very little value to society. Perhaps even more startling is the fact that for the year 2012 the entire planet’s top 2,000 R&D-spending companies spent about 700 billion in R&D which is still 300 billion less than what our National Security spending was at the time. It might very well be the case that the USA’s National Security related yearly consumption of wealth is similar to that which is consumed in corporate research and development by the entire planet, which is not only a gigantic detriment to the taxpayers who have to forego the enjoyment of a trillion dollars worth of wealth which is then used to sustain all the people associated with the bureaucracy, it also greatly slows down mankind’s technological progress.

If our military wasn’t so needlessly huge, the people currently employed by it doing drills, moving military hardware around, would be employed in the private sector adding wealth to it instead of being enormous drains on society. Every hundred thousand dollar missile or bomb we fire to destroy some building and inadvertently kill civilians, also destroys a hundred thousand dollar home over here which was never allowed to come into existence because the food/clothes/medicine needed to sustain the people building it had to be diverted to sustaining the people involved in the manufacturing of the missile/bombs. Every dollar we spend above that which is truly needed to protect ourselves is a dollar we spend destroying ourselves and our future. If military spending/consumption actually led to economic growth, the always-backward-and-poor former Soviet Union and today’s North Korea, with their relatively large militarizes would be prosperous, yet simple economic logic easily helps explain why they were not so. If military spending/consumption is obviously bad for the economy, then all-out war is even more so. How can having even more people stop producing civilian/useful goods (homes, cars, energy, medicines, etc.) and thus reduce the economic pie, to increase the amount of weapons which are then used to destroy lives and infrastructure and wealth possibly be good??!! Although understandably difficult to believe, prominent economists like 2008 Nobel Laureate in economics Paul Krugman lack a basic understanding of the cycle of production and consumption and thus foolishly believe that war and military spending, even in the absurd case when it is not done to actually prevent an invasion, is actually good for the economy. While giving advice on how to improve the slumping economy he mentioned:

“Think about WWII…it brought us out[of the great depression]. If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat…this slump would be over in 18 months,”

Krugman, believing that all we need for prosperity is some “stimulus” or incentive to “create jobs” and “economic activity” via buying and selling, completely overlooks the vital fact that whatever “activity” takes place in the economy must be coordinated in a way that produces more real/civilian wealth than it consumes, otherwise you are just obviously reducing the economic pie, and military spending and even more so war is the most destructive thing one can do. Below is Krugman in perhaps the most economically ignorant and disastrous TV segment ever where he mentions the above and more. It is truly scary to realize there are such morons in the government probably imagining a war with Russia might be good for the economy.

Obviously a basic understanding of economics is the key to realizing just how disastrous our military-related expenditures are, and this is precisely what Osama bin laden had, which made him undoubtedly one of the greatest military leaders ever. Perhaps no military leader has managed to inflict so much damage on his opponent given the relatively scarce means he had. Osama bin Laden studied economics and business administration at King Abdulaziz University and his understanding of economics became his main weapon. He tells us his strategy:

“We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat,” “We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah,” “All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations,” “Every dollar of al Qaeda defeated a million dollars, by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs,” “As for the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.” “And it all shows that the real loser is you,”…“It is the American people and their economy.” — CNN

What an embarrassment to what remains of freedom and Capitalism in our nation. Some guy in a cave thousands of miles away that has been dead for many years has managed to let American tribalism and economic ignorance destroy us from within. Not only is our economy being destroyed but so are our freedoms as this kind of criticism becomes treasonous. Amazing how history repeats itself. Actually, it is not really history that repeats itself:

“It is human nature that repeats itself, not history.” — John Toland

So, we can see how Trump, via his economic ignorance and flag-waving tribalism, is bin Laden’s greatest weapon.