Des canons sans beurre

Paul Waldman observes that Donald Trump’s war of (very bad) choice is costing fortunes, but for Republican wars money is never a constraint:

Speaking to Sky News last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was asked if there was some point at which the Iran war could grow so costly that he would tell President Trump it had become unaffordable.

“Absolutely not,” Bessent replied.

Whatever it costs, the American taxpayer will pony up. That makes this war a lot like all our other ones. And however much it looks today like the war will cost, it will almost certainly cost more. That’s how war works: It’s always more complicated, difficult, and expensive than the people who start it think it’s going to be. But with only one or two exceptions, Republicans are unperturbed by the effect of Trump’s “excursion” on our national balance sheet.

[…]

We’re less than three weeks into this war, and already the numbers are shockingly large, even if they’re difficult to pin down with precision.

In a briefing early on, the Pentagon told lawmakers that the first six days of the war cost $11.3 billion. Democratic Sen. Chris Coons, not one given to hyperbole, said after the briefing, “I expect that the current total operating number is significantly above that.” The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that after 12 days, the cost had risen to $16.5 billion.

While some days cost more than others, the total price tag will keep rising. Expenses include everything from the ordnance we’re going through, which will will have to be restocked (for instance, each Tomahawk missile costs $2.5 million or more, and we’ve launched hundreds of them at Iran), to the extra fuel the Pentagon is using, to rebuilding the systems and bases Iran is hitting, to the medical costs for injured service members, and more.

And this is before we get to the massive costs that will be imposed by choking the Strait of Hormuz — higher prices for energy, agricultural commodities, pharmaceuticals, etc.

It is trite to observe that we could be spending this money on positive-sum things rather than negative-sum things, but it’s trite because it’s true. And yet Republicans are notably less likely to face media scrutiny for these tradeoffs:

And what could we do with $50 billion, the low end of what the Iran war will cost? So many things. We could give Medicaid coverage to 6.75 million Americans. We could pay for free school lunches for every public school student in America. We could fund the National Park Service at pre-DOGE levels for 17 years.

When Democrats want to do those things, and especially when they want to do something big, the cries of “But how will you pay for it?!?” ring out from both their opponents and the news media. So they come up with an answer. For instance, when they passed the Affordable Care Act, Democrats labored for months to produce cost savings and tax increases to offset every penny of new spending the bill entailed.

Republicans feel no such obligation. Their most consequential piece of legislation in recent years was the Big Beautiful Bill, which will increase the deficit by $2.4 trillion over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. In addition to cutting taxes for the wealthy, it showered money on the Pentagon and allocated $170 billion in additional funds for immigration and border enforcement.

But Republicans are the party of Fiscal Rectitude, don’t you know, by which I mean they can send some 23-year-old incels to starve African children in exchange for no material savings.