Financial Cost of the Iran War

Many posts have discussed war powers and the US military.  The Iran War has been a disaster.

Edward Wong and Aruni Soni at NYT:

For U.S. taxpayers and consumers, the cost of the war is at least $132 billion, according to Moody’s Analytics. That factors in military spending, rising energy and commodity prices and interest rates, said Mark Zandi, the company’s chief economist.

A top Pentagon official told Congress last month that the cost had risen to around $29 billion for the military. That estimate did not include the price of repairing about a dozen U.S. bases in the region damaged by Iranian attacks.

The costs of repair and maintenance, as well as keeping carrier strike groups at sea, also need to be factored in. “It costs a lot of money to just keep everyone and all this apparatus deployed there,” said Linda Bilmes, a public finance expert and senior lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School. She added that the replacement costs of the enormous number of munitions that the U.S. military has expended will be much higher than the original purchasing costs.

Iran also severely damaged other U.S. assets in the region, including a valuable military radar jet on a tarmac in Saudi Arabia and the U.S. Embassy compound in Riyadh.

Surrender

Many posts have discussed war powers and the US military

"There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!... IRAN WILL HAVE A GREAT FUTURE. 'MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).'” - President Donald J. Trump 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/H2HKkBVkww

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 6, 2026

Despite the brilliant performance of the US military in the war against Iran, Trump signed a memorandum of understanding that amounts to a surrender ... by the United States.

Mike Nelson at The Dispatch:

Finally, and shamefully, the agreement puts a final nail in the coffin of the Iranian people’s hopes that the United States would support their cries for freedom. “The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States undertake to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.” A conflict that started with the hopeful protests of a people pushing back against almost five decades of oppression ends with the country meant to be the beacon of freedom agreeing to turn a blind eye to the slaughter of 30,000 Iranians, or the inevitable continued crackdowns, executions, and repression. No matter how he wishes to run from it now, we should never forget the president’s undeniably clear messages to the Iranian people when he thought this would be easy—“help is on the way,” “the hour of your liberation is at hand.” Vance, already having shown his callous disregard for the deaths of Ukrainians, adds the Iranian people to the mix in his attempt to carry his boss’s water, “if the Iranian people want to rise up, great. That's their business. That's between them and their government.”

The conflict ends with a seeming disregard for the disposition of uranium we said we were fighting to secure, for the arsenal of missiles we said we were seeking to destroy, and for the oppressed Iranians we promised we were going to help. The war ends with nothing of value to show for it. We will have killed thousands of Iranians, destroyed hundreds of missile launchers and air defense systems, but to what end? For the privilege of achieving nothing quantifiable, we have provided Iran with proof of a strategic deterrent it can exercise at any time, provided the regime with access to a massive cash influx, rebuilt its relationship with proxies that was damaged after October 7, damaged our alliances and relationships, spent billions of dollars, expended a large percentage of our critically short precision munitions, and lost 13 American lives, to say nothing of the hundreds of wounded. As with so many of his missteps or failures, President Trump will likely try to categorize this as a win, shift the way it is remembered with the passage of time, blame someone else, or just hope it fades from memory as he moves on to what he deems truly important business, like ballrooms and reflecting pools. But this will likely be the largest and costliest error of his presidency, and one for which he deserves permanent shame.

Fake TR and Plutarch Quotations

Many posts have discussed fake quotations from Lincoln, Jefferson, Tocqueville, and others. 

Add Theodore Roosevelt and Plutarch to the list.

 Sammy Westfall at WP:

A giant banner bearing the face of Theodore Roosevelt decorates the facade of the Office of Personnel Management in downtown Washington and carries an inspirational quote it attributes to the late leader. There’s one problem: Historians say the 26th president never uttered the phrase.

“Courage is not having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don’t have the strength,” says the quote, which is overlaid in serif font under Roosevelt’s portrait and attributed to him.

But scholars of the quotable Roosevelt say there’s no evidence he ever said those words, even though references linking him to it appear online.

“What I can say for certain is that the quote did not originate with Theodore Roosevelt,” Michael Patrick Cullinane, co-director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center, said about the federal government’s poster on the Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building, which houses OPM.

The Theodore Roosevelt Center, housed at North Dakota’s Dickinson State University, keeps a list of quotes by the president — about valor, patriotism, leadership, fear, action — maintained and updated for years by historians and researchers along with original documents of origin. Searching the word “courage” pulls up three pages — but no quotes matching the one on the poster. Ask The Post AIDive deeper

Phrases misattributed to Roosevelt are common enough that the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library’s website keeps a running list of them.

This is not sustainable.

Plutarch warned us 2,000 years ago that the imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

We have got to democratize our economy so that it works for all. https://t.co/6APdjhw4NU

— Governor Gavin Newsom (@CAgovernor) June 12, 2026

From Gabriel Rossman at Code and Culture:

Apparently it’s a thing to quote Plutarch as having said “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” This phrasing does not appear anywhere in the Project Gutenberg edition of the canonical Clough version of Lives.

It is possible that “oldest and most fatal” is just an unusual translation from the original Greek and so doesn’t turn up in a ctrl-F search, but I am extremely skeptical. As somebody who has actually read Plutarch (and who quotes him accurately in my own syllabus), it doesn’t pass the smell test. Plutarch has a distinctly aristocratic perspective and is more likely to complain about demagogues pandering to the mob than to complain about the dispossession of the poor. For instance, in his lives of the Gracchi he describes the underlying grievances of the depopulation of small farms and the rise of the latifundia, but he also criticizes the Senate for going squishy by offering conciliatory redistributive measures (specifically, a grain dole and colonial land) to the mob, “by gratifying and obliging them with such unreasonable things as otherwise they would have felt it honorable for them to incur the greatest unpopularity in resisting.” Mind you, I think it is entirely fair to read Plutarch and come away with the opinion that the facts he describes provide evidence that inequality is indeed the oldest and most fatal ailment of republics, I just don’t think that’s Plutarch’s own opinion, let alone his language.

AI in Political Ads

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.  It is easier than ever to spread lies at scale.

AI deepfakes are increasingly showing up in attack ads. Andrew Solender at Axios:

Driving the news: The latest spot to push the envelope is an attack ad against Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico from a President Trump-aligned group called Citizens for Sanity.The ad depicts Talarico in a dress singing an abridged version of "Favorite Things" about transgender children.

Talarico has been a frequent target of this practice: The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) used AI in March to depict Talarico reciting past social media posts. The posts were real. Talarico reading them was not.

Zoom out: While the Texas Senate race has been a hotbed of AI use — Republicans John Cornyn and Ken Paxton and Democrat Jasmine Crockett all utilized it to some extent in the primaries — it is far from the only one.The GOP primary in Kentucky's 4th district saw widespread AI use by both sides.

That included a "throuple" ad, which contained deepfakes of Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) dining, checking into a hotel and holding hands with Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

Pro-Massie spots used AI to depict an elephant with Trump-like hair and a MAGA cap, and Ed Gallrein, Massie's challenger, abandoning Trump in a foxhole.

In Georgia, gubernatorial candidate Brad Raffensperger used AI in multiple ads to depict his GOP primary opponents wildly shooting guns in the air and fighting each other with pugil sticks.

A new ad from another Georgia gubernatorial candidate, Burt Jones, is entirely AI-generated and features depictions of his GOP primary runoff opponent Rick Jackson shoveling money into a furnace and inflating a hot air balloon with his breath.

It's not just Republicans making use of AI:

In Texas, Crockett made use of AI to inflate the crowd size in one of her ads and posted an AI video to social media of herself, Trump and others as babies.

In New York City, Democrat-turned-independent Andrew Cuomo used AI in the mayoral election in an ad that portrayed him performing various jobs, including subway conductor, stockbroker, stagehand and window washer.

In Maryland, a new ad from Democrat Harry Dunn in the 5th congressional district includes a brief shot of AI-generated men in suits reading "Crypto" and "AIPAC" tossing golden basketballs into a carnival free-throw game.

The Federal Debt Hurts Americans Right Now

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt.

Martha Gimbel at The Atlantic:

What should matter is that the consequences of this debt are not off in the future, but already here. The government’s deficits have saddled many American families with higher costs, largely from rising interest rates. The Budget Lab, the policy research center at Yale where I am the executive director, recently estimated that congressional-spending decisions since 2015 have raised Treasury yields by almost a full percentage point, which affects what American households pay to borrow. For someone taking out a 30-year mortgage at last year’s median home price, this rise in long-term interest rates has increased their borrowing costs by about $2,500 a year, or roughly $76,000 over the life of the loan. (The Budget Lab has built a tool to help users calculate their own extra mortgage costs.)

The problem is not just for Americans who are lucky enough to buy a home. The bloated government budgets and waning federal revenues of the past decade are driving up costs across the board. Compared with a world in which these fiscal-policy changes did not take place, the annual borrowing costs on a typical auto loan are now up by about $120, and by about $770 on a typical small-business loan. Credit-card borrowing rates are also hovering near record highs.

Although affordability has become a watchword for politicians who understand that rising prices are hurting American families, lawmakers seem to have forgotten that reducing federal deficits would help bring down prices. In the 1990s, Congress and the White House prioritized bringing deficits down by both cutting spending and raising revenue—moves that lowered borrowing costs for American families by about 0.6 percentage points, according to Budget Lab calculations. But few lawmakers seem to be suggesting the spending cuts and tax increases necessary to lower costs now.

...

Politicians respond to electoral consequences. Right now there is nothing stopping them from doling out tax cuts and spending promises while also driving up interest rates. Voters may complain that their lives are becoming unaffordable, but hardly anyone seems to appreciate that federal deficits are partly to blame. If we want to see lawmakers actually address this problem, economists need to do a better job explaining the stakes. This means that instead of talking about the fact that our national debt could fill all 32 NFL stadiums with two tiers of construction pallets filled with $100 bills, we should be talking about how deficit spending is making it harder to pay our own bills.

Deleting Government Posts

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute."   -- George Orwell, 1984

A number of posts have discussed presidential documents, official data, and government websites.  The Trump administration has killed off or limited access to many such resources, including the CIA World Factbook and DOJ press releases about the January 6 insurrection.

Anna Lieb and Aaron Smith at Pew:

The State Department recently announced that it would delete its X posts from before January 2025 and archive them internally, rather than keeping them public. (We collected data from this account before those posts were removed.)

Pre-January 2025 posts have also been removed from the accounts operated by Customs and Border Protection (@CBP), the Justice Department (@TheJusticeDept), the U.S. Trade Representative (@USTradeRep) and the Department of Defense – which is also known by its secondary title, the Department of War (@DeptofWar). The department retains the DOD account despite changing its handle in 2025.

Two of these accounts – @StateDept and @DeptofWar – are among the top three government accounts on X by number of followers.

Renouncing US Citizenship

Many posts have discussed citizenship and expatriation.

Terry Ward at CNN:

Official government figures related to Americans renouncing citizenship are difficult to pin down.

A State Department spokesperson said in an email to CNN that it does not publish statistics on the number of US citizens who choose to renounce their citizenship, adding that the Treasury Department publishes a quarterly IRS report on expatriations. The IRS told CNN that it does not have compilations of the number of annual expatriations.

But according to Americans Overseas, a resource for US citizens living abroad that tallies the number of names reported within the quarterly IRS reports, 4,889 people are listed on the agency’s list for 2025, the highest number since 2020 when the figure spiked to 6,705. The organization said it is receiving significantly more inquiries about renunciation this year and is predicting a 15% increase in expatriations over last year, with numbers expected to remain elevated over the coming years.

Americans Overseas is currently advising roughly 40,000 US citizens, most with dual citizenship, in Europe and throughout the rest of the world who are either in the process of renouncing or inquiring about pursuing it, according to Daan Durlacher, co-founder of Americans Overseas.

Durlacher said he isn’t seeing all the names of clients he knows have renounced their US citizenship in the IRS reports, and he suggests that the figures are underreported. The IRS did not immediately respond to follow-up questions about the reports.

“These numbers are not complete, and I don’t know why,” said Durlacher, a dual Dutch and US citizen who was born in the Netherlands to an American mother.


To renounce something means to give it up, usually by formal declaration. Indeed, renouncing US citizenship is both a formal and legal process that requires potentially arduous paperwork as well as appearing for an in-person oath in front of a consular officer at a US embassy or consulate office outside of the US, along with other requirements.