America’s two decades of war cost taxpayers $5.8 trillion, so far – National & International News – WED 1Sep2021

Two decades of war cost taxpayers $5.8 trillion, so far. Texas’ abortion strategy could be used to curtail any constitutional right. UN: Number of weather disasters soar, deaths fall.

NATIONAL NEWS

America’s two decades of war cost taxpayers $5.8 trillion, so far

A new report from the Costs of War Project at Brown University tallies that the total cost for the U.S. “War on Terror” will reach an astounding $5.8 trillion by the end of 2022. And that’s not all. Health care for veterans will likely top $2.2 trillion through 2050, bringing the total to more than $8 trillion. 

This figure includes funding for the Department of Homeland Security and increases to the Pentagon’s “base” budget.

Not included in this estimate is the interest for the money we borrowed for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By 2050, the interest alone may reach more than $6.5 trillion!

The human cost

The Costs of War report estimates that as many as 929,000 people have died as a direct result of the war on terror. That includes combatants and civilians, but civilians make up the vast majority. About 3000 people died on 9/11. So 929,000 is about 309 9/11s, or 15 9/11s every year for twenty years.

But the human cost also includes lost opportunities to invest in making people’s lives better by investing things like infrastructure, climate-change readiness, education and healthcare. Lindsay Koshgarian of the Institute for Policy Studies says, “We’re not dealing with all of those problems because of how much we’ve had tunnel vision and invested in this one vision of security — that really isn’t meeting our needs”.

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Texas’ abortion strategy could be used to curtail any constitutional right

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a legal challenge to a Texas abortion law, which restricts abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detectable, around 6 weeks. This is before most women even know they are pregnant. The law effectively bans most otherwise constitutional abortions, even in cases of rape or incest.

Spy on thy neighbor?

Whether you’re pro-life or pro-choice, anyone with strong views on any social issue should have concerns about the way Texas’ new law is enforced. Rather than imposing criminal penalties, the law essentially encourages private citizens to spy on one another and report any suspicion they have.

The law does not target the women getting the abortion. Instead, it allows any private citizen to sue any person who aids and abets a woman in obtaining an abortion beyond the 6-week threshold for at least $10,000. That means any random person could sue you if you give a woman a ride to an abortion clinic. If you give a pregnant woman information about obtaining an abortion, you can be sued. Some interpretations of the law suggest that someone could sue you just for donating to a service like Planned Parenthood. You can even be sued for condsidering doing any of these things. Essentially, a thought crime.

That enforcement strategy could apply to any social issue

Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas in Austin, says the law is “a cynical attempt to make it harder to challenge the underlying ban” in court. The fact that private citizens, and not the state, are enforcing this law makes it very difficult to challenge in court since there’s no single public official challengers could sue to block the law on the grounds that it’s unconstitutional. 

But Vladeck also says states could use this strategy to craft hard-to-challenge legislation to curtail a host of constitutional rights. Vladeck uses the example of 2nd Amendment gun rights. For example, “What if California turns around and passes gun restrictions that have a similar procedural trap?”. In such a case, the state wouldn’t be enforcing the law, but “private citizens who believe that someone’s keeping a gun in their home in violation of the relevant state laws”.

Beyond that, what if a random person could sue you for lending money to someone to buy a gun? Or driving them to the gun store? Or donating to the NRA? Or thinking about it?

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INTERNATIONAL NEWS

UN: Number of weather disasters soar, deaths fall

The World Meteorological Organization, part of of the UN, says that weather disasters are occurring worldwide four to five times more often and causing seven times more damage compared with the 1970s. In the 1970s, the world saw about 711 weather disasters a year. Throughout the 2010s, the average was 3,536 per year, or nearly 10 a day.

If there’s any good news here, it’s that far fewer people are dying, on average, as a result of these catastrophes. In the ’70s and ’80s, about 170 people died per day as a result of weather disasters worldwide. By the 2010s, that number had dropped to around 40 a day.

The WMO’s secretary-general Petteri Taalas says that, “we have been able to minimize the amount of casualties” despite the increasing frequency of heatwaves, flooding events, drought, and tropical storms.”  

“But the bad news,” says Taalas, “is that the economic losses have been growing very rapidly”. For comparison, weather disasters cost about $175 billion globally in the 1970s, when adjusted to 2019 dollars. For the period from 2010 to 2019, global weather damage amounted to about $1.38 trillion. As climate change worsens and exacerbates further weather events, Taalas says the growth of these costs will only accelerate over the next century.

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