• venusaur@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I don’t understand why Israel needs so much money. They’re not a poor country.

    • Carrolade@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      This is actually a fair question. To answer it fairly, wars are extraordinarily expensive.

      Remember in the first Captain America movie, how Cap starts off as a showman, trying to sell war bonds to the American public? This bit of the movie is rooted in real history, the government actually did that, just to raise money to help pay for WW2. War bonds are basically just savings bonds, where the govt goes to its citizens and says “give me $100 now to help pay for the war, and we’ll pay you back with interest in a few years”.

      Israel has fewer borrowing opportunities than the massive US did, though, so it’s a little harder.

      Even Russia’s war, relying on huge backstocks of Soviet equipment, is very expensive, and they saved up a huge amount of money over many years to be able to do what they are doing right now.

        • Carrolade@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Regardless of level of need, they did. They began the war with a gigantic war chest saved up. Hard to say what its at now, just about no level of income can pay for the level of expenditure a large, full-scale modern war requires.