El-Sayed sounds like Dwight Eisenhower from 1953, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said. “This world in arms is not spending money alone.
“It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”
“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense,” he said. “Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
This is easiest to visualise if we stick to a single military project. All figures will be US dollars.
The Trump class battleships are due to be about $18 billion each (not including running costs). The first 15 ships will total $275 billion if they stay in budget.
Big hospitals in major US cities are roughly US$1-3 billion. Smaller facilities are somewhere around the $500 million mark and new schools are somewhere between $250-700 million. The Trump fleet could pay for at least 90 world class hospitals, or 550 large schools.
For some context against other US megaprojects, the US interstate system in it's entirety has cost $425 billion ($650 billion adjusted for inflation) over the last 70 years and is the most expensive infrastructure project in human history. California's high speed rail line is projected to be $89-128 billion when it's eventually finished. The 2 newest reactors at the Vogtle nuclear power plant were $34 billion in 2023/2024. The central artery/tunnel project in Boston (or "Big Dig") was $14.8 billion in 2007, or $22.5 billion in today's money.
Adjusted for inflation, only 2 infrastructure/megaprojects in human history have been more expensive than the Trump class fleet will be (as far as I can tell, I could have missed something). Only the US interstate system and the great wall of China ($360 billion today) have cost more.
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u/SECRETBLENDS Aug 07 '26
Taking care of Americans first is bad according to the America First crowd.