Look, I am tired. You are probably tired too. But we have to talk about the absolute clown show happening in the **Russian war economy** right now. It is a perfect example of how governments everywhere are run by people who shouldn’t be allowed to operate a toaster, let alone a fiscal policy. The news is out. Russia has completely remade its money system for one thing: war. That is it. That is the whole plan.

Here is the simple version for those of you who don’t speak boring economist language. **Russian military spending** is currently consuming about half of its entire federal budget on the fight in Ukraine. Half. Imagine if you took half of your paycheck every single month and set it on fire in your driveway. Sure, the fire looks bright for a minute. It feels warm. But eventually, the fire goes out, and you have no money for food, rent, or fixing the leak in your roof. That is Russia right now. They are burning the furniture to heat the house.

They call this a "war economy." The suits on TV will tell you that Russia's GDP is actually growing. They point to the charts and say, "Look! The numbers are going up!" And technically, they are right. The numbers are going up. But let me tell you why that is stupid. It is stupid because the government is just paying itself to make things that explode.

When a factory makes a car, someone buys the car, drives to work, and does something useful. That is a real economy. When a factory makes a tank, the government pays for it with your tax money, sends it to a field, and it gets blown up. The money is gone. The tank is gone. The value is zero. But because money changed hands, the economists mark it down as "growth." It is a lie. It is a zombie economy. It is walking around, but it is already dead.

This spending does absolutely nothing for the future. It doesn’t build better schools. It doesn’t fix the roads that are falling apart. It doesn’t help grandmas buy groceries. In fact, it makes everything worse. Because the government is pouring so much cash into the war machine, prices for normal things are going through the roof. **Inflation in Russia** is eating people alive. You want to buy eggs? Too bad. The price of eggs is competing with the price of artillery shells.

And let’s talk about the people. An economy needs people to work. But Russia has sent a huge chunk of its working men to the front lines. A lot of others looked at the situation, realized it was a disaster, and packed their bags to leave the country. So now you have factories that have plenty of government cash but nobody to run the machines. This creates a severe **labor shortage**. Wages go up, which sounds nice, but prices go up faster. It is a dog chasing its own tail, and the dog is rabid.

The West isn't any smarter, by the way. They thought their sanctions would crush Russia instantly. They were wrong. They underestimated how much pain a government is willing to inflict on its own people just to prove a point. The West is full of leaders who love to pat themselves on the back while accomplishing nothing. They sit in their air-conditioned rooms and make rules that don't work, while the rest of us deal with the mess.

But back to Russia. This cannot last forever. You simply cannot spend half your money on destruction and expect to have a functioning country in ten years. It is math. Even a child understands this. If you spend all your allowance on firecrackers, you can’t buy lunch. Russia is buying billions of dollars of firecrackers.

What happens when the fighting stops? That is the question nobody wants to answer. When the government stops pumping trillions of rubles into tank factories, the whole thing collapses. The jobs vanish. The fake growth disappears. The sugar high ends, and the crash is going to be ugly. It is a cliff edge, and they are driving straight toward it with a smile on their faces.

This is what happens when you let politicians run things. It doesn’t matter if they are in Moscow, Washington, or Brussels. They all think the same way. They think they can cheat reality. They think they can print money, start fights, and ignore the consequences. They don't care about the long term. They only care about looking tough right now.

So, while the experts argue about GDP and interest rates, just remember the simple truth. Russia is eating itself. It is hollowing out its own future to keep a war going. It is tragic, it is stupid, and it is exactly what I expect from the human race at this point. Nobody learns anything. We just keep making the same mistakes, burning our money, and wondering why we are broke and miserable. Cheers.

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### References & Fact-Check * **Original Report**: [Russia Remade Its Economy for War, but It’s Come at a Huge Cost](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war-future.html) (*The New York Times*) * **Context**: The article interprets data regarding the shift in Russia's federal budget allocation toward defense spending, resulting in short-term GDP growth driven by military production despite long-term economic risks like inflation and labor shortages.