The only way wars will ever stop is if we require the people who profit off them to pick up the bill.

The administration will soon ask Congress to approve $100 billion in appropriations to pay for this unexplained, unauthorized, unhinged war in the Middle East that is, every day, killing the people in Iran we’re supposedly fighting to empower.

That‘s roughly $300 from every American to pay for a war they didn’t ask for and most of whom don’t support. But don’t worry, we’ll just roll the expense onto our national credit card … meaning it will cost us probably double that in interest payments by the time it’s “paid off.”

Meanwhile, the stockholders of Palantir, General Dynamics and all the AI companies who have bent the knee to the Pentagon are happy as clams. And members of Congress are accumulating shares in those companies right now, even as they have the power to fund the spending that fuels the stock growth.

So, a humble suggestion … how about we pay for wars with windfall profit taxes on the companies that benefit from them? Take out the war profiteering and suddenly they become so much less appealing.

It’s an old issue in American politics, as this clip demonstrates, but it doesn’t make any of it less true.