On the main page, we have an editorial making the case for the $40 billion Ukraine aid package. But putting my spending hawk hat on, I am left with trepidation about authorizing another large expense at a time of historically high debt. The question I keep chewing over is: What is the limiting principle on Ukraine aid?
Shortly after the Russian invasion, I made the case that our general approach should be to make Ukraine as costly as possible to Vladimir Putin, with as small a cost as possible to ourselves. We have a strong interest in making life difficult for Putin in Ukraine, for many geopolitical reasons, but also due to the simple fact that invading other countries is a bad thing, and it should be seen as something costly rather than beneficial to the invading country. This is something to which those who are anti-war should also be sympathetic.
However, at some point the cost of making life difficult for Putin becomes too much to bear for us. There’s always a danger of agreeing a certain category of spending is good (in this case, aid to Ukraine) and then becoming overly loose when it comes to authorizing subsequent spending in that category.
Adding the aid bill that passed the Senate today to monies already allocated, we will have spent nearly $54 billion on Ukraine in the past few months. In this era of trillion-dollar spending bills, it may not seem like a lot. But just to put it in context, that’s more than 2021 spending on the Department of Commerce ($13 billion); NASA ($22 billion); the Department of Energy ($34 billion); HUD ($35 billion); the State Department ($36 billion); and DOJ ($39 billion). In 2020, before a recent temporary expansion, the federal government spent $57 billion on subsidizing insurance through Obamacare’s exchanges. And how about the aid to Israel that is subject to so much controversy? In 2016, the two countries signed a memorandum of understanding in which the U.S. committed to $38 billion in military aid — but that was over 10 years.
So, $54 billion is a lot of money. There is certainly an argument that providing help to Ukraine is a worthy cause. But there are a lot of causes that are worthy that need to be scaled back when federal debt is about the size of the nation’s annual economic output. There is also the argument that if we don’t spend this money, that it could prove costlier down the road. But that is the case for many government programs.
Thus, while I am sympathetic to the underlying arguments for aiding Ukraine, as somebody who is always warning about our unsustainable debt burden, I feel an obligation to provide scrutiny to new spending even when I believe the cause is just. Given that this won’t be the final request for money to Ukraine, I would suggest that my fellow conservatives think long and hard about what the limiting principle is here when it comes to government spending.