Source? The Congressional Research Service published a report in 2014 stating $1.6 trillion as the cost of war. Every other article I could find suggests this number is far too low and estimates $2-6 trillion.
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-war-anniversary-idUSB...
https://www.brown.edu/web/documents/nosearch/2016CostsofWar....
For perspective:
* Hillary Clinton's campaign platform included a decent infrastructure bill - allocating $250 billion over 10 years.
* NIH is estimated to spend $8 billion this year on cancer and cardiovascular research - the leading causes of death in America, killing over 1 million people each year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War
Accounting is a creative endeavor.
Even moderate estimates put it at about $5 Trillion, the most conservative at $3 trillion, with the high end (reality) at $8+.
One huge cost people completely ignore is the cost of health care for the vets we bring back who suffer from a huge number of physical and mental issues. It's also one we'll be paying for the next 40-50 years.
As I said, you can project all sorts of future costs, or costs to the broader economy. But $14T is a nutty figure to claim was available to spend in lieu of wars and bailouts.
Additionally, to ignore future costs is absolutely how we end up spending incredible amounts war mongering and passing the deficit to future administrations and people. If we correctly calculated the costs it would've been seen as outrageous. What you're saying is analogous to buying a car but not factoring in the cost of interest, when that interest payment is 25%, and the cost of maintenance and repair.
You provide zero proof to backup your claim as well. Show me something to change my mind, or read the linked book and educate yourself. Spouting lies does nothing valuable for society or yourself. Let it be known my degree is in economics, I'm not spouting off some list of bullshit facts from a "documentary" video on Youtube.
Given that the entire war(s) have been funded off-budget I'm not sure I would accept a budgetary figure as given.
The military industrial complex is so out of control and bloated, we can't help but keep fighting wars to feed all these thousands of jobs going.
Very worrying state of affairs.
The money went to friends of corrupt US administrations and military contractors. That is 14,000 billion dollars stolen from American workers and shoved into the pockets of filthy rich white men.
It's not that we can't get it accomplished reasonably, you'd be amazed at how fast and cheaply major projects can be developed if funding is properly structured. It's rather that we've wasted our treasure on other things. Jack Ma had an interesting comment at Davos[1] - what would the US be like if we had spent the $14 trillion we've wasted on war and wall street bailouts on infrastructure, research, and education in the Midwest?
[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/18/chinese-billionaire-jack-ma-s...