According to data from the Drug Policy Alliance, the United States government spends $39 billion each year on the war on d***s. Cumulatively, it amounts to $1 trillion since 1971. However, recent findings have shown that illegal drug use in the US is once again on the rise, putting the effectiveness of these efforts and the amount of money spent in question.
The war on d***s is just one of the many examples where people spent exorbitant amounts on something that isn’t widely beneficial. Recently, a discussion about it surfaced on Reddit when someone asked, “What was the biggest waste of money in human history?”
The responses poured in, from similar war-related expenditures by other countries to the millions of dollars spent on the very first NFT.
These answers may disappoint you but also expose how ill-advised people can get with money.
#1
I gotta go with Nanni for buying that sub-standard copper from Ea-nāṣir bank in the 1700s BCE. Just a terrible decision all around, from what I've read.
Image credits: LordBigSlime
#2
4 trillion dollars to replace the Taliban with the Taliban gotta be up there.
Image credits: names-r-hard1127
#3
Bailing out billion dollar companies during COVID like Delta Airlines that charges me $50 to bring a bag on an airplane. Instead of, you know, training new doctors or fast tracking those already in med school, or paying off their student loan debt.
Image credits: loyolacub68
#4
UK voting for Brexit. This has cost billions already in lost GDP with the eventual figure likely in the 100s of billions as it impact compounds in the decades to come.
Collective madness.
Image credits: number5of7
#5
Tax breaks for the rich.
Image credits: Away_Media
#6
Quantatitive easing, and the banking bailout.
We’ve created a system where businesses can be ‘too big to fail’ and they can expect a bailout when they get into trouble, but when times are good all the profits go to the shareholders. So we’ve privatised profit, and socialised risk. This means we’ve effectively rigged the game for capitalism, making a system where market forces are no longer fully in play, and creating zombie companies that should have folded a long time ago.
#7
Me forgetting to turn off the lights, according to my dad.
Image credits: Th3Giorgio
#8
Most of Dubai's Artificial islands.
Image credits: indywizard08
#9
Capitalist agriculture and food distribution. Like every second potato is thrown away, milk is overproduced and thrown away, cow hides are destroyed rather than tanned for leather to keep leather prices stable, insecticides and herbicides to maintain massive monocrops killing pollinators and low key poisoning us instead of higher total mass yield less intensive multi cropping, like keeping pigs on an apple orchard to eat the fallen apples where the apple eating beetles lay their eggs to k**l off a pest instead of spraying... oh no but instead we feed the pigs unsold grocery store stuff, all ground up, the packaging left on rather than paying people to take it off first. So much for labor efficiency, thanks capitalist goons. Restaurants not sending their best either, it's waste cruelty and exploitation all around the chain and the cost is incalculably high.
Image credits: YohoLungfish
#10
The Swedish ship Vasa.
The Vasa was built in the 1620s to take advantage of the very newest in warship technology, a second row of guns. It was to be a symbol of Sweden's might, and thus was decorated with beautiful statues and carvings. This ship took three years to build and cost roughly 5% of Sweden's GDP.
Unfortunately, the effect of a second row of cannons on seaworthiness was poorly understood. With great fanfare, the ship set off, experienced its first breeze, and still within full view of the city of Stockholm, capsized and sank.
Image credits: thosearesomewords
#11
The banana with duct tape.
Image credits: jinjis_diary
#12
War on dr*gs, an impossible battle.
Ok_Turnover_1235:
Trillions of dollars later and h*roin is 50x cheaper and 10x more potent.
Image credits: deloidian
#13
Trump's $1.7 trillion gift to the wealthiest of the wealthy. Everyone in the US is paying $5,000 of their taxes directly to them. Call me crazy but I think we should claw it back.
#14
Scientology.
#15
The Vietnam War at $176 billion. Countless dead for no reason, and nothing positive came of it.
Image credits: Potater72
#16
Everyone here has better answers but I've gotta mention Twitter. What an absolutely idiotic way to buy a company. Acquire because someone told you you can't, fire 80% of the staff, abolish the branding completely, remove mod support, offer worthless utilities that used to be free as part of a "premium service," then force push notifications to every single user that are really just your personal tweets, and when people still won't listen to you masquerade as an anonymous user on your own app/company, artificially inflate your own follower count, and be your own biggest supporter.
Image credits: nick3790
#17
Can’t believe nobody has mentioned world war 1..
Literally all of the world’s most wealthy nations completely financially ruining themselves and slaughtering a large proportion of their young men and all of the historical consequences that followed over essentially nothing and achieving nothing except for a massive geopolitical regression with costs which we are arguably still reeling from today.
Image credits: MIKOLAJslippers
#18
When Covid was in full swing and the entire trading market crashed then the federal reserve tried to “stimulate” and “save” our overlord corporate scum by injecting 3 trillion dollars into the stock market just for it to immediately crash again like 2 minutes later.
#19
The Iraq War (2003-2011): Regarding the cost, Estimates vary, but it's in the trillions of dollars, with some sources suggesting around $3 trillion when including long-term healthcare for veterans, interest on borrowed money, etc.
#20
Got to be that person who bought the first ever tweet as an NFT, purchased for $2.9million, now worth about $4.
Image credits: Qabbalah
#21
King Louis IX spent something like the entire GDP worth of France on religious relics such as a piece of the True Cross. A sliver of wood said to have been from the cross that Jesus was crucified on. It doesn't take a genius to see it was a fake now.
Image credits: vajonjon
#22
Indulgences. As in the Free Pass given for sins during the Crusades. You could literally buy God's forgiveness for sins past or future.
I'm no accountant but I'm pretty sure that's a waste of money!
Image credits: BuySplendidPie
#23
New Zealand spent about 25 million dollars (NZD) on a flag referendum, before it started the public were against it saying we would never change the flag, the government persisted anyway, two years later the public voted to keep our current flag, so we did 😅 massive f**king waste of time and money for a result they should have been expecting from the very beginning.
Image credits: mediocre_mediajoker
#24
Those guys who bought tickets to the titanic sub.
Image credits: Yeet-Retreat1
#25
Stonehenge.
The whole thing was supposed to be 18 inches tall, but the work crew misread the runes.
Image credits: Bill-Glover
#26
When the US government bailed out Goldman Sachs after Goldman Sachs bought AIGs failing bonds at pennys on the dollar, fully knowing they would fail, and getting bailed out by ex Goldman Sachs Ben Bernanke at full face value of the bonds. Biggest robbery of the American Taxpayer and largest waste of money in history.
Colin Powell’s lie about weapons of mass destruction and the resulting War on Terror is also up there. But to be fair the US had to respond to 911 physically. Was just so overblown
#27
There was no other human project that was of a greater magnitude than the Reality Labs @ Meta. For reference it cost is comparable to the core part of the Apollo Project so far and it is only the beginning. Total cost of Meta's Metaverse exceeded $100B in 2023. No other single project comes close to this. (and its s**t)
Capital Expenditure each year:
2018: $13.92B
2019: $15.65B
2020: $15.72B
2021: $19.24B
2022: $32B
2023: $28.1B
2024: ??? (expect significant reduction)
EDIT:
Fixed the inflation adjustment as correctly pointed in comments. In today's dollars, Apollo program main development was ~$150B, with ~$300B for all auxiliary projects included. Keep in mind, Metaverse is shutting down in its INFANCY after ~$140B devoted to it. Nothing has been fundamentally accomplished other than a multiplayer Sims4 ripoff. Apollo program landed a man on the moon within $180B employing about 400k people pushing the boundary of the technology in electronics, transmissions, material science, propulsion etc. that we inherited as a society.
Image credits: Stubbby
#28
Nuclear weapons - 5600 BILLION US dollars
To create a weapon, that is designed not to be used, but instead to create a scenario (mutually assured destruction) so they are never used.
#29
The CIA putting a microphone into a cat to spy on commies only for that cat to get hit by a car, I think it was like 6 million dollars and countless years of preparation and training only to be lost under some tires.
Image credits: Democracystanman06
#30
Australia's emu war 💀
#31
I'm scrolling long enough, but I never once saw the CIA trying to spy on "friends of Dorothy".
Background: a "friend of Dorothy" was a mid century slang for gay people. CIA thought this slang refers to some random woman who organises drag shows and riots. Many tried to infiltrate the gay community in order to her to this woman. In reality, many queer people had strong affinity to Wizard of Oz movie.
#32
The Great Wall of Gorgan, built by the ancient Sasanian Empire in modern-day Iran. The purpose was to protect themselves from Nomadic invadors.
It was constructed with 100 million man-days of labor, which is equivalent to around 300,000 workers toiling for five years straight.
Considering the average labor cost, material expenses, and other related expenditures, the total cost of the project could have reached an astronomical sum of approximately $130 billion in today's dollars!
Needless to say, that it failed its intended purpose as Huns devised techniques to overcome the wall without much hassle.
Image credits: hobabaObama
#33
Insurance.
I can't believe this isn't near the top right now with the CEO and the fires.
#34
The Vatican.
#35
I’d have to say that gym membership I didn’t cancel until 8 years after I moved away.
Image credits: highfunctioninglazy
#36
consider the palace of versailles - louis xiv’s gleaming monument to absolute power. fourteen billion livres poured into marble halls and mirrored galleries, while france’s peasants starved in their millions. but the true waste wasn’t in the gold leaf or the fountains. it was in the way versailles transformed human nature itself into an ornate game of appearances.
the nobility bankrupted themselves maintaining the elaborate fiction of their own importance, spending fortunes on the right clothes, the right apartments, the right to watch the king wake up each morning. they abandoned their estates to crowd into tiny rooms, competing for the hollow prize of royal attention. entire bloodlines extinct now, having spent their last coins on silk stockings and powder for their wigs.
what makes it devastating isn’t the money - it’s how versailles became a machine for converting human dignity into spectacle. aristocrats who once governed provinces reduced to obsessing over who could hand the king his shirt at morning dress. a system so perfectly designed to waste not just wealth, but the very essence of human potential.
even the king himself became trapped in the apparatus of his own glory, every moment of his life transformed into theater. fourteen hours a day performing the role of the sun king, until even he couldn’t tell where the performance ended and the man began. an entire civilization pouring its resources into an elaborate performance of power, while beneath the gilt and gardens, the foundations of their world rotted away.
the halls still stand, of course. tourists shuffle through them now, phones raised to capture the excess. but what they’re really looking at is one of history’s most exquisite machines for wasting not just money, but humanity itself.
#37
Internet in Australia.
Back in the 2000s, An outgoing Labor Government preposed an ~30 Billion dollar, Fibre To The Premise Nationwide Broadband Network Internet plan promising speeds of up to 100Mbit/s. The incoming Coalition Government, promised a cheaper Fibre To The Node Broadband network that utilised the already installed copper wiring for just under $950 million... And now because of that, the internet in Australia is just barely becoming able to reach speeds on 1000Mbit/s, after a revision to the planned rollout which has cost the Australian Government over 70 billion dollar.
Image credits: Chaos_HonchKrow
#38
Panama canal first attempt. The French didn't understand what they we're getting themselves into and death from mosquitoes killed off too many that the project had to be abandoned.
Image credits: Glover31
#39
Politicians spending hours of taxpayer-funded time on oral mass-debation speeches to promote themselves when they already know how they will vote on things, plus the time spent on researching and speech writing.
#40
My degree.
#41
AOL merger with Time Warner.
#42
The Victorian government here in Australia gave up on hosting the Commonwealth games, they spent $589 million dollars for nothing.
#43
Probably that Dutch guy who spent money buying tulips in 1636.
ThreadbareAdjustment:
Basically a massive inflation in the price of tulip bulbs in 17th century Netherlands. It's considered the first speculative bubble in history.
A misconception is people were paying so much for the tulip bulbs themselves though. They were actually buying contracts to get one when they bloomed later which only happened a few months a year. So someone would buy a contract on one in hopes of making a profit reselling it...and the price eventually hit ten times what an average laborer would make in a year before the bubble burst completely after about three years.
Image credits: ThinkingThoth_369
#44
Anyone who ever invested a cent into meme coins especially the “Hawk coin”
#45
I cant believe no one has mentioned the failed seige of Rhodes in 305-304.
Long story short, Demetrius I, King of Macedon, was afraid of Rhodes naval power and their potential alliance with Egypt. Demetrius decides he's going to attack Rhodes, but to do so, he's going to need massive machines of war. With Alexander the great's innovations, Demetrius bolstered and scaled them up. (This guy was known as the "Besieger" for his skill in siege warfare)
Demetrius invents and has the Helepolis built, a massive rolling tower on wheels.
The Helepolis was a great siege tower, 130 feet tall and 65 feet wide. It sat on eight wheels and casters so it could be moved forward and back and laterally as well. It had multiple stories connected by sturdy stairs, one for ascending and one for descending. Its sides were iron plated for fireproofing and had portals that opened when the catapults fired. The Helepolis weighed 160 tons and required hundreds of men to move it via the capstan and belt drive and thousands more to push it from behind.
The Helepolis contained a variety of armaments on each of its nine floors. Two 180 pound catapults and one 60 pounder were on the first floor. The catapults were categorized by the weight of the missile it threw. Three 60 pounders were on the second floor and two 30 pounders on each floor above that. The top two floors contained men armed with bows and dart throwers for killing defenders on the city walls. The tower’s ironclad, mechanically-adjusted apertures were lined with animal skins, wool and seaweed to make them fireproof. The Helepolis was the largest siege tower of its time.
When Demetrius brought the Helepolis to bear, the Rhodians knocked a hole through their own wall under cover of night where they expected the Helepolis to attack. They then flooded the entire area with water and sewage so when the massive tower was moved up the next morning it became deeply mired in the mud.
Ultimately, the siege failed and Demetrius left Rhodes, leaving behind all of his siege engines. Years later, the Rhodians sold the remains of those siege engines, including the Helepolis, which earned them enough money to build one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the Colossus of Rhodes.
#46
Ford Motor Company spent $250 million dollars on the Edsel, only for the brand to be an unmitigated failure. That's $250 million in 1958 money. Adjusted for inflation, that's $2.6 billion today.
#47
Cleveland Browns paying $250 million for Deshaun Watson.
Brotonio:
So, storytime for non-Americans who don't know who Deshaun Watson is and why that number is so awful:
The Cleveland Browns have long been one of the worst teams in the NFL. Several years, they finally made it back to the playoffs, thanks to the effort of one Baker Mayfield, another quarterback.
However, Browns front office for some dumbass reason didn't want to retain Mayfield, and so decided to spend a $230-250 million dollar contract on Deshaun Watson, as well as include several draft picks in that trade. At the time, Watson had been a quarterback for the Houston Texans, and in his prime was seen as a generational talent who could take a good team a Super Bowl.
AT THE SAME TIME, allegations of sexual assault were springing up against Watson, totaling 20+ women. It doesn't matter if he was the best QB in history, that's awful PR and pissed off the entire NFL fanbase. Still, the Browns paid for him.
Cut forward to 2025, and Baker Mayfield was able to make it to the playoffs with his new team Tampa Bay Bucaneers (even though they just lost), and Deshaun Watson has played F**KING AWFUL FOOTBALL.
He's genuinely one of the worst quarterbacks out there, had been suspended for 11 games due to the allegations, and taken numerous major injuries since getting signed (his most recent one tearing his ACL, which knocks you out for the season.)
Before the Watson trade, the Browns were seen as a team people pitied, because it felt like they could never catch a break each and every year. Now, they are a reviled fanbase, and I don't see their reputation ever recovering until every single person involved with that trade is fired and out of the organization.
TL:DR: The Cleveland Browns replaced their already good quarterback Baker Mayfield with an alleged rapist in Deshaun Watson for millions of GUARANTEED dollars, only for that QB to be absolute ass.
Small edit/ addition: His contract is FULLY GUARANTEED. The only way for the Browns to void it is if he either medically retires, or he's convicted/ accused of another sexual crime OUTSIDE of the 20+ they knew about before he was signed.
#48
When Mobutu decided to print Zaire money, but the cost of print turned out more expensive than the total worth of the printed money.
Image credits: jayniuss
#49
Jeff Bezos' $42M clock that will allegedly run for 10,000 years.
Image credits: TruthExposed
#50
Not the dumbest but a personal favorite of mine.
The US military spent hundreds of millions developing the XM-29 rifle. It was basically a grenade launcher with some extra bells and whistles. They wanted it to replace the M-16 so every grunt would be carrying one.
In a shockingly unshocking turn of events, that's a freaking war crime. 300+ million dollars later and a single Google search could've prevented it.
Image credits: Ranoutofoptions7
#51
The British Royal Family.
