More Demagoguery against Ukraine Aid

The Heritage Foundation posts:

I have written previously about why the $900 number is disingenuous. It takes the total amount of money spent on Ukraine aid over the entire conflict, $113 billion, and divides it by the number of households in the U.S. The $900 is accurate arithmetic, but the conclusion Heritage wants people to draw from it does not follow.

The U.S. spent $39,100 per household on Covid relief, so the government spends far more on domestic emergencies than on foreign ones. National debt per household is $256,000, so $900 is not driving the debt. The total on Ukraine aid, on an annualized basis, comes out to the equivalent of 9.2 percent of our defense budget. That money is being used to effectively fight one of America’s top adversaries and degrade that adversary’s military capabilities, all while putting zero American lives at risk.

In addition, not all the money goes to Ukrainians. Much of it goes to U.S. defense contractors, which employ Americans and contribute to U.S. economic output. Attributing agency only to Biden is wrong as well. The money was spent in accordance with the will of Congress, with broad bipartisan support. Heritage wants Congress to change its mind, but if it wants to sway representatives’ opinions, it should make better arguments than this.

Congress didn’t raise taxes to fund Ukraine aid. Americans right now are not feeling the burden of the additional spending. Americans in the future will, when the lenders to the government will need to be paid back. But again, Ukraine aid is not driving the debt. Turning foreign aid into a fiscal concern is an age-old tactic in American politics to distract from the actual cause of the debt problem: broadly popular domestic programs. The federal government could end all foreign aid, including Ukraine aid, tomorrow, and it would hardly even register on the CBO’s budget projections.

As for the pictures, a big part of the reason Kyiv looks so nice is that U.S. funding and weapons have supported the Ukrainian war effort. Russia tried to take Kyiv at the start of the war — and failed. Ukraine on its own would have been unlikely to fend off Russia as well as it did.

A picture of a town in eastern Ukraine wouldn’t look so nice. Pictures of Bakhmut are especially harrowing. Russia has been perpetrating war crimes, and the destruction has been severe. The pleasant picture of Kyiv is evidence of U.S. policy success, not failure.

The Heritage Foundation should be a source of high-quality information that dispels myths about the federal budget. Many of its scholars in the past have been some of Washington’s top leaders on that issue. Many of its reports today still provide quality information on the budget. But this post and the accompanying effort to demagogue aid to Ukraine do not show Heritage at its best.