Comments by "The Zero Line" (@The_ZeroLine) on "What will Trump's victory mean for Ukraine?" video.

It always amuses me when US tax dollars comes up as an issue when anyone who has studied military aid to Ukraine is aware that not only has it not cost us a dime, but it’s actually profiting us + enabled critical progress and reform to our own arms industry + military procurement philosophy (we’re finally realizing OST tech can perform better than ridiculously overpriced platforms like Switchblade in many cases, using companies like Anduril to substitute for things like JASSM and Hellfire missiles for a tiny of fraction of the price).
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@ That’s basically what we’ve been doing. There are also massive financial interests we’d be risking by allowing Russia to run roughshod over Ukraine, including the fact that they’d control so much of the world’s food supply (and already control nearly 100% of fertilizer) that they’d be able unleash famine and trigger refugee crises if we didn’t play ball.
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@ Not even that. It’s .002% of GDP and about .4% of its military budget if you take the numbers on face value, but those numbers ignore the fact that we assign values to stuff like DPICM, HMWVVs, MRAPs, which we were spending billions on to scrap. So, instead of paying all that money to get rid of something, we say “oh, this is worth $840m” and then hundreds of armored vehicles that were retiring or being retired.
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@paullangford8179 Exactly. And that’s just one small component of why the aid figures are amortized. People are also failing to factor in issues like the fact deterrence is always cheaper than war. If we’d let Russia just invade Ukraine with no response, imagine how much money we’d lose if China invaded Taiwan regardless of whether we went to war to stop or didn’t. An invasion of Taiwan would cost the global economy trillions. Or the fact that enabling Ukraine to attrit Russia’s military for pennies on the dollar saves us billions we would have spent on military assets just focused on contingencies for the remote possibility of Russian military confrontations.
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@mitchyoung93 Oh, wow, tell me you knowing about geopolitics without yada yada yada and tell me about all these “opportunity costs” lost due to aid to Ukraine and I’ll give you a list 10x longer of opportunity costs lost due to not providing Ukraine aid as well as 100 factors from commodity prices that would have been negatively effected for us to preferential market access we get from providing security to our allies.
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@davidc1878 Your point? That’s what happens when you don’t equitably tax the tiny portion of tax “payers” who hold more wealth than 90% of Americans combined + our middle class tax base goes extinct. Moreover, even if we accepted the face value of the aid, it’s .002% of GDP. It’s not even a rounding error. Furthermore, we give billions of military aid to Pakistan, Egypt, etc. annually and I don’t hear Trump talking about that. Or the fact that the largest part of our deficit has been generated under GOP presidents and literally every economic KPI is cumulatively inferior under GOP admins since 1953.
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@cheztaylor8 How is it coming from the “taxpayer’s pocket” when those systems were paid for decades ago and were costing us billions to scrap? There are only a small amount of systems, which are coming of new spending budgets. And that amount is easily covered by the corporate tax revenue generated by sales of new equipment to foreign militaries and our military own alone that’s been spurred by seeing the effectiveness of our arms versus the crap made by Russia and China. Not to mention that you act like it’d be free to tax payers if we didn’t do anything and then encouraged China to invade Taiwan or allow Russia a stranglehold on a major part of the world’s grain supply. You’re either being disingenuous or haven’t considered all the knock on effects.
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@ God are you naive. First of all, I’m not talking about just the EU or simply preferential treatment other countries wouldn’t get though yes we certainly do. Second of all, why do you think so many countries purchase exclusively US arms? Third of all, I can’t help you if you don’t understand our security guarantees (formal or implied) don’t come with economic benefits and special treatment. You think we’re still allowed bases in Japan because they think we’re just swell? Do you know how much more it would cost to project power into the pan-pacific without those bases?
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@ Dude, I can’t even w/dilettantes like you. You haven’t even bothered to look up how much we’ve spent on scrapping DPICM (and how far we still had to go) and haven’t even found the costs so far for scrapping HMMWVs. And do you seriously think because we still use HMMWVs that means we’re not scrapping thousands of them? I can’t spend all day educating you.
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🇷🇺 has ground itself down so much for political narratives + w/no concern for sustainability that 🇺🇦 will be able to hold it back from making any significant gains from here on out, but it won’t be able to focus on regaining large swaths of territory now that they’ll need to be conserving materiel. They still have lots of pledged arms incoming though with long term commitments for many partners. So, they won’t be running out of arms. My greatest concern in terms of potential new partners is that South Korea will now not change its policy in order to not alienate Trump. The North Korean troops, without their own armor, are more a hindrance than a help and Russia’s economy is too fragile and its stock to worn down to continue for long.
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@ Obviously I’m not going to through all the numbers in a YouTube comment. But you could say exactly the same about comments by Trump and right wing news. I obviously wasn’t counting system like PATRIOT and HIMARS or only counting job creation as how I balance the costs. There’s a lot more to it than that.
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@mitchyoung93 But, yeah, thanks for the hint… 🙄
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@ Definitely not. Besides, it’d all be “fake news” even if they did.
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@ lol, now Krembots are reporting my comments, hoping to get reality taken down. Just accept it. Even if all you’re hoping comes to pass, 🇷🇺 has sacrificed its economic future to achieve none of its goals + still capture less than 20% of 🇺🇦 (most of it prior to 2014 to boot). Good job!
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@ BTW, the defense budget is “800 million or so”? 😂 Please also tell me where you got $60 m (I’m assuming billion is what you meant) since that’s not even close to the right number. That’s problem with so many people. They don’t know WTF they’re talking about. You’ve seen a couple headlines. Didn’t even read the article and think you’re all filled in.
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@ [re: lost opps I’m assuming] But this wasn’t money on a spreadsheet available to be spent. It’s mostly $ values assigned to old equipment. Not money that could have been invested in a startup. And that’s not how gov. $ is used anyway with random investments.
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@ Considering u didn’t have $ taken out of your wallet, u shouldn’t be expecting to get money put into your wallet, Krembot. This would be like the US spending a billion dollars on our bases in 🇯🇵 to prevent a war w/🇨🇳 and save us trillions and then you’re like “when can I expect to get my 15 cents of that billion back?!”
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@ lol, yeah I’m disingenuous, Mr. Just registered a year ago to post propaganda Krembot? I’m glad you’re routing for genocide and still trying to spread disinfo that Zelensky is somehow getting rich from receiving armored vehicles 😂 or intentionally triggered a genocidal invasion.
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@ Straw man much? People: We need more hospitals! You: Not everyone loves the insurance companies!
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@ebrim5013 Trump has depended on Russian banks and investors since the early ‘90s (or at least he did until recently) to finance his businesses and I’m sure they’ve got lots of kompromat on him. So, I think this is pure fantasy
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