I got curious what Iran’s national budget actually looks like and theres not much good information there’s a Wikipedia article with no hard numbers.
The cited sources also seem to lack hard numbers. Here’s one of them. As a funny aside half of them are apparently dated by an Islamic calendar, so these budgets are from the year 1402. Iran definitely acts like it’s still the year 1402.
I didnt bother trying to get a translation of the articles cited since, again, they seem to discuss relative changes but no hard numbers. However, I think this picture gives us an idea what is going on.
We know from the Wikipedia article they raised the retirement age by 10 years, increased government and military pay, instated road tolls, and slashed the road budget at the same time. They raised their military budget by the equivalent of $5B USD (against a GDP of $375B) while raising electricity, natural gas, and water prices by 35% to pay for it.
To do a last bit of comparative math, the USA’s total military budget is about 3.33% of GDP, while Iran’s 2025 budget raised military spending by about 1.3% of GDP from whatever it was before. And again no hard numbers, but Iran’s direct government and military spending is very large, apparently it’s a driver of inflation.
So, actually, I think this take is basically correct.
I knew I’d hear this take. And I don’t buy it, in fact I think its very ignorant. No effort post with links this time since its been discussed to death. Iran’s current regime has been incredibly belligerent since they overthrow the Shah in 1979 with the help of communists, and seized total power by then killing all of the communists. In the 45 years since they’ve been shouting “death to america” and after two straight generations of this, only now are at they having the war with america their grandparents wanted. Maybe great great great grandparents since they marry 9 year old girls. That’s one of the “rights” they started a civil war for.
Plus they get in lots of smaller conflicts with their neighbors and they killed tens of thousands of civilians last time they had big protests (the equivalent of just pulling out an artillery regiment on BLM).
This is a military government which uses conflicts to stay in power and always needs a conflict.