this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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The disaster hit areas will get funds. It will be rebuilt. But none of that happens overnight. The US has spent $1.79T on disasters since 1980. Hurricane Katrina alone costed about 190 Iron Dome Systems.
I get that there's always more we can do, and trust me I really dislike that a ton of our budget goes towards war and military. But I think people forget how absolutely massive the destruction is in some of these disasters and how much it'll cost to rebuild. I mean the conservative end of cost from Helene is eleven years of 100% of the funds annually allocated toward FEMA. And that's just a single disaster.
We're still spending FEMA money on the 2013 Colorado Flood because these disasters are that destructive, the 2017 California wildfires are still a 15 million a year recovery operation that's still on-going. There's even $15B earmarked for COVID-19 and it'll likely be the late 2020s or early 2030s when we finally see that fall off the FEMA spreadsheet.
I'm not trying to defend the wasteful expenses on military that we do, but things like those missiles in the picture are minuscule to the massive amount of destruction these disasters bring. And I think it's important to highlight that because it hopefully gives people some clue to the true cost of climate change.
Good to know prevention has been taken seriously
How much have we spent turning brown kids into ash over that same 40 year span?
That's vague, but I'll assume you mean funding directly for combat operations excluding VA hospital, vet benefits, DHS appropriations, etc. So that would come to $19.903T over that same period.
But the thing is that also excludes maritime trade protection and I don't believe brown kids sail boats towards shipping channels, but there could be possibilities where that is the case. Also that dollar figure doesn't have anything to do with the event being depicted in the picture. That's Israel's Iron Dome system and costs associated with that would not be reflected in the US military budget. That is funded by general transfer of funds. Good example of such is public law 117-103. Under Division C, Title VIII, Sec. 8142 which is page 209 of that PDF linked there.
So that number doesn't include that and it'd be a lot harder to get that number as the Government doesn't put out a spreadsheet for general transfer of funds. Though they ought to, because that would make tracking all of this a lot easier. It's not impossible to calculate that, the information is all there, it's just spread out and requires a bunch of leg work.