Ukraine aid isn’t breaking bank

12 August 2023 01:05

A post from Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts:

New @Heritage analysis: the U.S. has spent nearly $900 per household on the Ukraine war.

Americans are rightly growing skeptical of sending even more money and weapons from our depleted armory with no accountability. Congress, take note. https://t.co/XrwJOJByCp
— Kevin Roberts (@KevinRobertsTX) August 10, 2023

Heritage arrives at this number by dividing the $113 billion that Congress has approved for supporting Ukraine by the 127.9 million households in the US, National Review reports.

The math is accurate (the precise number is $884 per household, as the piece Roberts linked to says). What conclusion we should draw from this fact, however, is unclear.

The $900 number is supposed to shock the reader. That’s a lot of money in terms of household finances. But we could do a similar exercise with other recent government spending efforts and see Ukraine aid in a different light.

The idea that the US is prioritising Ukraine over domestic concerns is not true. For example, the CARES Act that was passed in response to the Covid pandemic cost $2 trillion. That’s about $15,600 per household. Total Covid relief spending totalled around $5 trillion, or about $39,100 per household. That’s 4,244 per cent greater than Ukraine spending per household.

Ukraine aid is not driving the $32.7 trillion national debt. US national debt per household is about $256,000. The $900 for Ukraine is 0.35 per cent of that.

Consider the context of defence spending, which is a legitimate function of the federal government that should be prioritized in budgeting. The 2023 budget for the Department of Defence is $816.7 billion. That’s for one year. The $113 billion in Ukraine aid has been over about one and a half years.

At an annualized rate of $75.3 billion for Ukraine, the US is spending the equivalent of 9.2 per cent of its defence budget to fund a country that is willing and able to effectively fight one of America’s top adversaries and degrade that adversary’s military capabilities, all while putting zero American lives at risk. As a purely fiscal question, that doesn’t seem like a bad deal.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether support for Ukraine is a good idea for geostrategic purposes. It’s much harder to make the fiscal case against it. The unspoken assumption behind the $900-per-household number is that if only it weren’t for Ukraine aid, that money would come back to taxpayers. It would not. The government did not raise taxes to fund Ukraine spending, and it would spend those $900 on something else.

Hyping up aid to foreign countries as a fiscal concern is an age-old tactic in American politics. It’s much easier to argue for cutting spending when the beneficiaries of that spending don’t vote in American elections. But America’s spending problems are driven by health-care programs, interest payments, and Social Security.

The US has indeed spent $900 per household on Ukraine aid in the past year and a half. Based on this year’s projected outlays of $5.3 trillion, the federal government is spending about $14.5 billion per day, $605 million per hour, $10 million per minute, and $168,000 per second. Ukraine spending isn’t the problem.

Caliber.Az

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