Essay:The military industrial complex bubble

You've heard of stock market bubbles and housing bubbles, over-inflated prices reflecting no real value? When the bubble pops, it lets the air out of the bag and prices fall closer their real value. That's what America's $880 billion dollar defense budget reflects: decades and decades of inflated costs not reflecting its real value. The vaunted Javelin missile or Patriot missile systems for example, turn out to be nothing but examples of shrinkflation.

Is it possible to recover some of the stolen value and costs in the decades and decades of inflated values appropriated in the US government's #1 budget priority? No. Cause that cash was paid in labor and service costs, consumed long ago, and it doesn't exist in stockpiles of manufactured goods.

This is how miscalculations occur, for example thinking the Russian Federation's GDP was smaller than Spain or the Netherlands. The entire US economy became bloated and overvalued relative to comparisons with other nations, which is reflected in global statistics due the US dollars status in the global financial system. The US taxpayer has eaten the cost - through inflation - over decades and decades while at the same time creating the military industrial complex bubble, which was paid out in research, labor, maintenance and service costs, and not building the appropriate stockpile reserves needed in the event of war with a peer power.