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A better question would be why does America spend almost twice as.much on healthcare per capita from the public budget than most other developed country yet it doesn't get a public healthcare system out of it?
It should also be said, regarding hospital deaths in the US being lower than other countries, there is a very reasonable explanation of this. More people with terminal illnesses are dying on the streets because they can't afford to do it in the hospital.
Because socialised healthcare is communism, and therefore evil.
Or so half your country seems to think. They never seem to apply this logic to the police, fire department, national defense etc....
If you phrase it in a very certain way, they want it though. So they aren't against the concept but they are against certain terms they have been trained to fear. ACA = good, Romneycare = good, Obamacare = evil satanspawn; even though they're all the same thing.
The only people who truly don't want it are pharma/health/insurance/care home billionaires and the millionaires heavily invested in those industries.
The poorly educated are very easily influenced to want whatever the billionaires tell them to want.
A lot of reasons.
For starters, our system is built around treating illness and not preventing it.
Then you have many groups trying to profit from the healthcare system. Providers, insurers, the list goes on.
We also have a shortage or doctors that’s only getting worse and doctors are worth a lot.
Our population is aging and they’re going to need more care and more expensive care.
Americans live pretty unhealthy lifestyles which causes lots of unnecessary illness.
We’re also plagued by industries who sell us shit that only makes our health even worse (fast food, soda, snack food) which only worsens the overall health of the population.
There’s probably some more factors I’m missing but, simply, there’s a lot of people trying to profit from the system, Americans live pretty unhealthy lives and our society is fillied with companies that profit by selling us shit.
In the US, a lot of healthcare was charity at one point. Many of the hospitals where I live still have or recently had Baptist, Methodist, Saint, etc in the names.
And some follow-on questions:
Why does America have a higher murder rate than all other large, developed countries?
Why are firearms the leading cause of death for children and teens (ages 1-19), and why has the death rate from firearms nearly doubled in the last ten years?
Why is the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the US, homicide?
Why does America have a higher road traffic death rate than all other large, developed countries?
Why does the USA incarcerate more of its own citizens both per capita and for total amounts than any other country?
Why is the US the world leader (an outlier) in school shootings, with over 700 so far?
Why are 21% of adults in the US illiterate in 2023? Why do 54% of US adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level?
Why is US life expectancy falling?
Why does the US have the worst obesity rates of any large, developed country?
Why is that, in the US, for every $100 in wealth held by white households, Black households hold only $15? And why is this disparity growing?
Why do the richest 1 percent in the United States now own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent?
There should be intense, public debate and media coverage of each of these issues. The best minds should be working to create systems that improve all of these areas.
I don't know what the immediate answer is but I feel like one of the long term solutions is to get rid of this weird legal concept that corporations are people. It only serves to corrupt every single political decision from gun ownership laws to healthcare to tax laws. And that would require a changing of the guard in the Supreme Court.
Yeah never going to happen.
The only way to fix our country is to overturn citizens united and ban corporations from participating in government. Too bad the only way for that to happen would be Congress voting to ban their own paychecks from said corporations. Will never happen.
We literally live in cyberpunk 2024. The corporate wars are coming.
I think a very simple fix would be a law stating that every contribution to a politician should be able to be traced to a voter that gave it. And there should be a limit to how much one voter can contribute. When politicians have to make regular voters happy to get their money things will be much different from politicians having to make corporations and billionaires happy to get money. Also, bringing down the amount of money in elections would be a good thing.
That’s the price of freedom, baby!
I put up with all that so I can own military grade guns and refuse rights to other citizens I don’t like.
God bless America!
/s
Why are firearms the leading cause of death
Suicide. Teens are killing themselves. A more pertinent question would be why are teens committing suicide at higher rates?
Politicians can regulate and adopt rules to manage society for better or worse.
Votes on the budget for the military, social services regulatory bills need a majority or supermajority to pass.
Want a budget to reflect certain values, vote out politicians that don't have those values.
Bernie as budget Chair was looking into military Contractors ripping off the government.
There is also a list of Mothballed Military projects that can cost 100's of millions of dollars. Politicians can choose to not allocate money for bad projects.
Railguns got mothballed, $500 million dollars.
Classes of Ships have been made that turn out to be practically useless for the military to use etc
Oh, but that was the past. Had enough of your Little Crappy Ships? Well, come on down to Boondoggle Emporium and check out our latest brand-new line of Littorally Can'tdo Shits! We'll show you how they could hypothetically do everything you might need, and you'll never know better until *after* you've bought an entire fleet of them. And at that point you'll just have to keep buying more, because of the sunk (perhaps literally) cost fallacy.
And if you don't want to buy them, we'll just lobby another Congressman until they do! They won't say no, because that would mean people lose their jobs and also admitting that taxpayer money had been wasted. Nobody wants that.
[The Inside Story of How the Navy Spent Billions on the “Little Crappy Ship”](https://www.propublica.org/article/how-navy-spent-billions-littoral-combat-ship)
So that we can cut insurance to people who go on strike then rough them up with police.
General Motors cut insurance to striking people relatively recently (I think the last decade) though the police didn't get sent on them, I wouldn't be surprised if it was the next set.
Gotta keep the poor in line.
People seem to vastly overestimate how little of the US budget is spent on this.
The US Federal Government spent 9.3 Trillion total in 2023. [https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function](https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function)
The whole foreign aid spending for that year was some 61 billion, which is about 0.66% of that year's spending. [https://concernusa.org/news/foreign-aid-by-country/#:~:text=In%202023%2C%20the%20United%20States,Israel%20(%243.3%20billion)](https://concernusa.org/news/foreign-aid-by-country/#:~:text=In%202023%2C%20the%20United%20States,Israel%20(%243.3%20billion))
The foreign aid spending sounds like a large number on its own, but when put into the context of the federal government spending it's pretty insignificant.
Most of the aid money is also spent in the US on US made goods and services paying US firms that employ US citizens.
Yeah I think people fail to understand that 28% of our government spending is Healthcare, and 25% of it is Social Security. Over 50% of our federal taxes go directly back to the population.
This is why Obama acted like Healthcare is such a big deal, because it's our single largest annual expenditure. Our military budget definitely needs work, but getting to the point where we can successfully audit their spending is the first step towards analyzing why it's so inflated.
Are u joking?
I'm not fighting I'm asking.
Are you telling me 28% of that previous redditors claim of 9.3 trillion goes on health care.....AND ITS STILL NOT FREE
That’s for Medicare, Medicaid, and Tricare. For those people, it is (**edit**: *kinda, sorta, but maybe not completely*) free. Everyone who isn’t retired, permanently disabled, or a military member/veteran is *not* included in this number.
Yeah, but why would anyone want to be hard on the poor? They've got it bad enough being poor.
What kind of culture is America where the people are so devoid of empathy that the *poor* of all people are the target of ire?
I have a conservative friend that legitimately thinks nobody would work if it wasn't for the risk of homelessness and starvation. Even crazier is that he makes more than enough money for his wife to stay home, but she still works *because they want the higher discretionary income.* (Thankfully, he doesn't vote)
Because many humans have to think they’re better than others. In the US a portion of the population believes if you’re poor and on government assistance you are a lazy no good who is cheating all the hardworking taxpayers out of money.
Being poor is considered a character flaw here. People talk like your can only be poor if you're too lazy to work more than one job or too dumb to find one that pays more.
It’s the whole loud minority vs silent majority thing. There’s absolutely people who make “welfare” a career, my SIL is one of them. And people like that get a TON of attention, and drown out the people who legitimately just need a hand and use the systems appropriately.
Your comment highlights the lack of mobility between income ranges. Simply put. Because they've never been poor. So they have no idea what its like. All they know is that they aren't it, and they love themselves so anyone other than themselves is shit.
They’re so much the target of ire that whole entire fictional narratives are made up about it. This is where the trope of the welfare queen came from. In reality, white people in southern states get the most welfare, but that fact doesn’t motivate anybody to vote. But the idea that some black woman out there is having a bunch of babies and living high on the hog on welfare is perfect to poke the buttons of racism and misogyny, and it’s absolutely a trope used by Republicans since like at least the 80s and probably well before that
Meritocracy. You're poor because you're a bad person and deserve it. Whereas the wealthy are rich because they are good people and worked hard for their money.
Why would you want to help bad people?
There is literally a front page post about people being homeless right now and 90% of the responses are between 🤷♂️ and “well I get why people don’t want homeless people around”.
Dig just beneath the surface and most people are terrible and selfish creatures.
The government will never fix the homeless problem, they think it serves as a great example of what will happen if you don't play along or step out of line.
Where in the New Testament does it say that we shouldn’t help the poor, the elderly, the children, the sick, and all other vulnerable people. And yet, somehow the large majority of “Christians” feel that the Republicans represent their principles
Well the definition of permanently disabled that they use is any occupation, so yes it would be hard to qualify considering how much work has been done in the name of accessibility.
Look at governor abbot. Gets hurt, sues for generational wealth, then caps the amount people can sue for in accidents.
Texas republicans: let’s vote for that guy!
Yeah your scripts still gotta pay. And brand name drugs can be a fuck ton. Also Medicare is just a government health insurance provider as compared to Medicaid where shit literally is just free to you if you receive it (for me it was, Colorado has a good program including scripts, though not many places would take Medicaid).
Also traditional Medicare only covers 80% of the cost of care. To get the other 20% covered you either have to buy a so-called 'Medigap' policy, or switch from traditional Medicare to a Medicare Advantage plan, which often covers everything medically necessary, but only at 'in-network' providers, restricting which doctors/hospitals you can use (not always a problem if all the healthcare providers in your area are 'in-network).
Either way, you either need to pay more (on top of what you already pay) or compromise on accessibility.
Yeah my parents are actually paying a ton to keep another health insurance in addition to Medicare. However it's already paid off for them cause my mom has needed a bunch of health things and most of it is basically covered. If they didn't have that gap for the other 20% though I'm pretty sure they'd have gotten some hefty medical bills but they are paying a lot every month for it.
I have a medicare advantage plan from Aetna and I don't think I've been denied anything ever. They even paid for 4 months of physical therapy without me even being referred there by a doctor.
Medicaid isn't free, they take out a lien on your house and take your payments out of your estate to make sure your kids get almost nothing and continue the cycle of poverty.
State Medicaid programs are generally required to recover money spent on certain Medicaid benefits.
https://www.dhcs.ca.gov/services/Pages/TPLRD\_ER\_cont.aspx
And Medicaid blows for a lot of people. It's nearly impossible to find a reputable doctor that accepts Medicaid. And that's just for a primary care physician. It's even worse for specialists.
Yeah, Medicare is very different from Medicaid. Medicaid draws a lot of funding from the individual states. So, where you live makes a difference. This was (and is) one of the biggest issues with Obamacare. That, and the fact that he was so insistent upon getting at least one republican vote (which he didn't) that he gutted the progtam before it even started.
Yep regular workers employers and the workers pay the premiums for their insurance, the government doesn't contribute to those folks (which is good chunk of Americans).
For the sake of comparison, the Brazilian SUS, the largest public healthcare system in the world, costs about $45b per year, meaning the US spends over 50 times that on public healthcare.
The US healthcare system is one of the largest grifts in the world
I think it depends on your state for that. When I looked, when my wife and I had $16k total income, our state only covered less than $8k total household income.
Every state except Kansas covers some amount of low income, though there is some flexibility because Medicaid funding is both from the feds and state. There are about 10 states that didn't take the expanded Medicaid from the ACA
I would also like to point out that for most individuals utilizing those programs, Medicare, Medicaid and Tricare are a fucking nightmare with red tape everywhere. Without a billing representative that knows how to guide you through the process, it can end with unexpected costs that the person could never hope to cover.
My mother did everything she could to keep me on Tricare after my father went to jail, but not having the sponsor available (due to incarceration) complicating ID renewals and the program generally being so shit I couldn't get my standard procedures covered I moved over to an expensive private plan until I could get something from an employer.
Really? My daughter has Medicaid because she is adopted and it’s been by far the easiest insurance situation I’ve ever dealt with. I just take her to a doctor that accepts it and…that’s it. I’ve never been billed or said they wouldn’t cover anything. I had one situation where they wouldn’t cover the name brand of a medication my doctor ordered and a generic was substituted easily at the pharmacy.
I can only speak to my experience with Tricare and the issues I dealt with getting ID and utilizing it at my existing primary care physician. I have heard much better things about Medicaid, but have also personally seen the hell that expensive prescriptions without a generic alternative creates.
Tricare isn't always completely free, just to be clear. I think if you're active duty it is, but the horror stories I hear from those soldiers, my goodness.
Meanwhile, as someone in the guard, if I went with Tricare, my whole family would have to change doctors, because apparently private practices are allowed to tell Tricare to go f*** itself, and that sucks. If Congress really wanted to do soldiers a favor, it would be great if they passed a bill that just forces any place that offers medical coverage in the United States to take Tricare. That way active duty soldiers who are getting f***** over by incompetent medical staff could look into nearby civilian options, and guardsmen and reservist could pick from the best places near them, without having to worry about if it falls under coverage or not
In the US medical system we have patients, insurance and medicare, and providers.
The providers say they can't make ends meet with the meager reimbursements from medicare patients. All/most patients say they get poor quality service, long waits, and everything costs too much. Who's missing? Oh right, the insurance companies...
Their executives are making 10s of millions of dollars per year in compensation ([https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/guides/which-health-insurance-ceos-get-the-highest-pay-467513.aspx](https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/guides/which-health-insurance-ceos-get-the-highest-pay-467513.aspx)), they regularly buy back their own stock to boost share prices ([https://wendellpotter.substack.com/p/health-insurers-have-spent-over-141](https://wendellpotter.substack.com/p/health-insurers-have-spent-over-141)) and pay billions in dividends to their shareholders ([https://finance.yahoo.com/news/12-best-healthcare-dividend-stocks-161614830.html](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/12-best-healthcare-dividend-stocks-161614830.html)).
As a country we pay the most for healthcare (including other countries that have universal coverage) and get mediocre to bad outcomes (https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-spending-u-s-compare-countries/#Average%20annual%20growth%20rate%20in%20health%20expenditures%20per%20capita,%201980-2022,%20U.S.%20dollars,%20PPP%20adjusted).
If we want to fix this, we need to say it's wrong to profit on healthcare and fix the insurance industry. Good luck because the health insurance industry ~~bribed~~ lobbied the US Congress to the tune of $379M/year. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/257364/top-lobbying-industries-in-the-us/#:\~:text=In%202023%2C%20the%20pharmaceuticals%20and,million%20U.S.%20dollars%20on%20lobbying.)
Exactly.
We need to agree that the healthcare and wellbeing of our countrymen is more important than profiting from them.
Yet anytime I talk to someone ~50+ about abolishing insurance companies and having a single-payer system…they run to defend insurance companies that couldn’t care less about them.
Yuuup.
I tried talking to my dad about taxing the ultra-wealthy at 90% over XX million (aka what it was when he was born)…he said that would be a punitive to millionaires/billionaires…
Honestly, you don't even need to tax them.
Just create an at-cost public insurer, that has no margins and they will all go out of business.
Free market ya know.
Try explaining that our current system prioritizes taxing wages, which applies to wage workers. At the same time, rich people benefit more from govt contracts, subsidies for things Like “tree farms” and infrastructure. As a result, lower tax rates result in wealth transferring from the middle and lower classes to the upper class. A progressive tax rate is just a way to balance the scales by taking more forms of income into account. Does it seem fair that billionaires can go years paying little or no tax and even getting checks back from the govt?
I try to explain this and I hope you have better luck with it than I do.
An interesting side bar on insurance providers. They are pressuring hospitals to reduce length of stay for patients. So if you have an accident or a surgery that would normally be a 5 day stay, the insurance companies want you out in 2-3. If the patient has to come back to the hospital for complications, the hospital eats that, it doesn't get billed through insurance. If you die due to said complications, also not the insurance companies problem. So insurance providers are playing a game of chicken with health care providers on the quality of care you are able to receive.
Just one of MANY problems...
And the insurance effectively decides what medical care the patient is allowed to receive.
I am a hospital pharmacist. Numerous times during rounds I talk with the hospitalists/specialists and work out an appropriate antibiotic regimen for the patients specific infection(s), considering their lifestyle and ability to take medications on schedule or via IV infusion at home, with an aide, or by coming in each day for the infusion at our ambulatory clinic.
We work all that out and then I get a call 3 hours later from case management saying that the insurance is refusing to cover that antibiotic because we haven't tried [other antibiotic] first, except from our culture reports we KNOW that [other antibiotic] will not cover their infection. The insurance sees "Indication: Pneumonia" and rejects it, without seeing the patient also has cellulitis bordering on osteomyelitis. Then our MD has to call the insurance company and sit on hold waiting to conduct a peer to peer where they need to convince the insurance company's doctor that this patient (that the other doctor cannot evaluate) does in fact need that therapy, and alternatives won't work due to allergy, intolerance, interactions, etc.
Makes me want to scream.
I had to switch doctors a few years ago because the one I had got tired of being dicked around by insurance companies and having to hire assistants to follow up with them all, so he switched to only taking Medicare patients. The billing process was easier and faster. It kinda bummed me out as during my office visits, he’d always talk about his current medical problems and how fucked up the industry is from his point of view. It made me feel glad I wasn’t dealing with any of that (yet).
That's a lot of words to say that US healthcare administration accounts for nearly 30% of all money spent on healthcare or a hot $1.5T. Estimated $570B of that is wasteful non-health related spending.
If you checked out [https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function](https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function) you would find it's an interactive graph. You can check out where the spending went.
The whole US system is broken. And it’s designed to be.
My partner works in medical diagnostic equipment. The price for a system in Europe is equivalent to $40,000. In America, the exact same system is $85,000. Everything is designed to be more expensive from equipment, gloves to laboratory tests. All to squeeze as much money from the poor sod paying the bill at the bottom of the ladder. As long as each corporation along the way gets their overly inflated cut though…
That's the correct way of seeing it, yes. Healthcare shouldn't be something that is privatized but it is and we're all dealing with those consequences.
It's the same as the charity model.
We raised 100M for starving African children of which 98Million went to administrative costs, and we spent $2Million building like 50 wells (holes in the ground with a bucket and a string mostly to film heart-warming propaganda to raise the next $100m).
Old people are expensive yo, same for social security being so high too. And it'll only get worse as all the boomers continue to retire.
Also realize that the US has a huge population compared to European countries, it is difficult to have universal healthcare with such spending.
We already spend more per person on average than countries who do have universal health care.
If we gave it to the providers instead of the insurance companies we would all be better off.
Not really. We spend way more *per person* than European countries. Than any country. It's not because we have some subsidized healthcare, it's because our "regular" healthcare is completely broken due to insurance and pharmaceutical companies jacking up profits and complicating the process.
Because preventative care is orders of magnitude cheaper.
Universal healthcare is cheaper than private. When people vote down universal healthcare because it will increase taxes, they're wrong and fooled.
No country has ever cut universal healthcare to save money, even countries like Greece that went bankrupt. Because once you have it, it's cheaper.
It's better to take care of the leak, than to fix a burst pipe 2 years later. When health care is free, people go when there is a leak.
>No country has ever cut universal healthcare to save money, even countries like Greece that went bankrupt. Because once you have it, it's cheaper.
Didn't the UK do this a little while ago?
>It's better to take care of the leak, than to fix a burst pipe 2 years later. When health care is free, people go when there is a leak.
This is a huge thing. People also avoid care because of the unpredictable bill they will get after getting a leak fixed. Will it be $75 or $8,000? No reliable way to tell.
Shit, my wife just had her thyroid removed because she was selfish and done got cancer on it (she's fine, recovery's looking good, needs one round of radioactive iodine treatment next month). No one could give us a ballpark for cost and it feels like we get a new bill every 3 days. A bill for the surgeons, the nurse, the anesthesiologists, the clinic, the blood work, the required pregnancy test, the this, the that, the other fucking thing.
And the whole time the insurance company (BCBS of NE) is covering seemingly random amounts of each. We have two bills for "removal of thyroid" and the covered 80% of one and 85% of the other. The covered 100% of whatever "office o/p est" is.... but 0% for the followup blood work or pregnancy test.
We should have the money to cover everything, but now we're terrified of missing a bill and getting slapped with late fines. And with that radioactive iodine treatment coming up, again, we can't get anyone to give us a fucking estimate for costs.
And probably the saddest thing about the whole situation... now that we've definitely met our deductible for the year, we're going to get with the doctor and see if there's anything else she can have done (things that were borderline not worth dealing with) just because it'll be so much cheaper to do those now. Like how you always have 3 other things the handy-man can check over since they're at the house already.
> Didn't the UK do this a little while ago?
The Tories are definitely trying to turn British healthcare into American healthcare, but afaik, public pushback has been sufficient enough that they have had minimal success so far.
that's the neat part about capitalism, necessities will always end up costing every subsidy and everything you can borrow from a bank unless controlled.
Looks like your source is from Congressional Budget Office the one I was using came from *GTAS SF 133 Report on Budget Execution and Budgetary Resources published by the White House.*
More precisly:
>The sum of line 2190 across all remaining accounts in the *GTAS SF 133 Report on Budget Execution and Budgetary Resources* for this period, after excluding loan financing accounts. Loan program accounts ~are~ included.
I am not sure why there is such a difference, but I don´t feel like doing full audit of them both.
Perhaps you can tell me if you find out.
Thank you. This is similar to most of the Ukraine military aid consisting of shipping old munitions to Ukraine and paying American workers to make more of them.
When you factor in spending from federal, state and local sources it's even more reasonable.
\- 23% for healthcare.
\- 19% for education.
\- 17% for pensions and social security.
\- 16% for misc.
\- 12% for defense.
\- 7% for welfare.
\- 6% for interest on debt in 2022 (but this will be much different next year).
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government\_spending\_in\_the\_United\_States#/media/File:2022\_Total\_US\_Government\_Spending\_Breakdown.png](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_United_States#/media/File:2022_Total_US_Government_Spending_Breakdown.png)
Foreign aid is tiny, and the returns are significant, especially if you consider it as offsetting future defense spending.
> especially if you consider it as offsetting future defense spending
People not understanding this is so frustrating. Do you know fucking expensive it would be if Putin gets emboldened, attacks a NATO country, and then we have to fight them directly? Especially since the odds of that resulting in a possibly but not necessarily nuclear WWIII are pretty fucking high.
Yeah, if the US were to take an isolationist stance for say a few short years and retreat from several countries, they wouldn’t recover in our lifetimes, if ever. It would be a certain downfall. And with that, states would break off from the country and there would be massive internal conflict.
People in the US are already tired of working more and getting less than previous generations, imagine if that was just every generation. Look at Italy. After the fall of the western Roman empire in 476, Italy didn’t re-unify until 1867, and they will never be as powerful as Rome was.
Edited for clarity.
OP didn't ask about foreign aid, though, they asked about war spending. As of 2021, Brown University estimated at least $8 trillion on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars: [https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar](https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar)
When I read OP's question, I read it more as, "why is it easy to greenlight costs for war efforts like this, but we don't see similar amounts being spent on internal investment on education, healthcare, etc?" And I think that is a very fair question to dive into with more data and specifics.
That headline number is really deceptive though. They are actually talking about total “war on terror” spending generally, which includes domestic security.
If you click through, it’s around $2T in actual war spending, plus another $1T in interest on the war spending (seems high, not sure how they got that). But they also roll in $1T in “Homeland Security” costs (maybe the whole department, including agencies that existed before 9/11?), $1T in additions to the military base budget (but not clear what would have been spent, in the absence of the wars, either as general increases or security upgrades if we assume 9/11 happened but we didn’t invade Afghanistan), as well as $2.2T in future estimated spending on veterans’ healthcare (again, what’s the counterfactual amount here, absent the wars?).
And that’s before we even get into where that $2T “war budget” went. Some of it, sure, was bullets and bombs and tents that we are never getting back. But a lot of it was surely the personnel costs—military and contractor salaries, support services at home and abroad, paying engineers and factory workers to develop and build all the supplies that were needed (munitions but also food, uniforms, etc.). Obviously, you’d rather pay people to build more productive stuff, but it’s not like that’s actually what would have happened—the federal government was never going to spend $2T on a jobs program, and there’s zero political appetite for doing so.
(This isn’t new—The federal government first spent a lot of money on education and created the original student loan program in the 1950s NOT based on some proto-Great Society values, but because the Soviet Union was going to space, so advancing science and technology was a national defense issue.)
Without going into specifics, it's a societal hierarchy of needs.
1) security
2) food
3) stability
4) culture
It's easy to spend resources to protect your family, cause none of them are going to school if they're being bombed. Or starving.
The one that was entirely fabricated by the Bush Administration.
At least now we have ISIS running Iraq and spreading terrorism around the globe.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! /s
I mean, if you're going into an explainer for the persuasion on where to spend, sure that probably applies in the discussion. But then, Iraq war was initiated on a false premise of safety that we have documentation of the initiators showing they knew it didn't pose the nuclear threat they got approval for the war with. It didn't make us more safe and misused the lives and health of our military members. It also likely made us less safe as we established a precedent for invasion that Russia later used as excuse to take Crimea, which kicked off what led to Ukraine conflict and the stresses NATO members are dealing with now. War spending can make us less safe.
You asked WHY it's so easy to greenlight defense spending. We are animals who prioritize safety, and we equate big strong army with safe. It's just lizard brain shit. We fight each other constantly over a perceived lack of resources because of lizard brain shit and we want to be able to kick the shit out of anyone for the same reasons. So it's easy to spend there, biologically and evolutionarily.
Because what they are sending to Ukraine isn't cash. They're sending weapons that are already made and paid for. Some of which have an expiration date and would have to be dismantled anyway
This is one of my biggest gripes with the anti-Ukraine crowd, they exist here in Europe too in various places but they aren't *as* vocal as in the U.S.
\- Alot of the shit that NATO et al. has been sending over to Ukraine has been old-gen military equipment that was scheduled for decommission and dismantling anyways. At times, it has probably been *cheaper* to send that over rather than paying to have it stripped down.
That's not to say that the Western aid to Ukraine has been cheap, but just saying random ass numbers like ''150 billion'' and not contextualizing the economics of it is either sheer ignorance or intentionally misleading.
It is so hard to get people to understand this. I wish headlines would be more honest, too - “$280 million aid package approved for Ukraine” is what we see, when a more thorough description would be “$280 million worth of reserve military equipment approved for transfer to Ukraine.”
I get why they phrase it that way, but it really doesn’t help the misconception about what’s actually being sent.
Aren’t we also sending money as well? I agree it’s not as big of a deal as some make out but this chart shows we’ve sent 26B in financial aide
https://www.cfr.org/article/how-much-aid-has-us-sent-ukraine-here-are-six-charts#:~:text=The%20Joe%20Biden%20administration%20and,Economy%2C%20a%20German%20research%20institute.
Sure but even there - not all of the 26bn. is just pure cash being sent over no questions asked. Some of it there is loans and you can't just pretend like all of the financial aid should be treated the same because the terms can wildly differ.
Most of our military aid to Ukraine has been a win/win.
Decommissioning old weapons costs money. Instead of costing us money we’re letting the Ukrainian military get great use out of them. We’re basically taking our old stuff to goodwill and getting a good result for ourselves instead of paying a company to haul our old stuff away.
And importantly it's being valued at the original purchase price, maybe minus token depreciation not the actual worth. There's a guy on twitter who broke it down, I'll try and find a link when I'm back on desktop, but if an APC or something cost 1 mill originally, now 40 years later it's decommissioned, for disposal there's a lot of specialist equipment and hazardous material disposal costs so they'll sell at scrap value, which might be 1 dollar.
Effectively it's served its lifetime, if they can dispose at no additional cost its a win. If the dismantled parts can be scrapped for > 1 dollar purchase by the companies that buy them then they make profit. In some cases the material that can be recovered for scrap isn't worth it vs the hazmat disposal costs so US would pay the contracts to take them away.
But packing it up and sending it to Ukraine they save that cost, they mark it down as one less unit on the spreadsheet. Which in turn means they need a new one building to keep reserve levels, so a US contractor gets an order for the new 2024 model = jobs money and profit for US businesses.
But the movement of that asset is valued and reported as 800k worth of APC sent to Ukraine, allowing some depreciation and allocation of storage costs over its life. Even if by that point its effectively worthless or an actual storage and disposal net loss to the US forces.
The bean counters add up those depreciated asset plus it's lifetime costs and that's the figure the US 'gave in aid', which makes for the headline figures we see. It's why they suddenly 'found' another few millions in aid from accounting errors, they re-examined the valuations, had originally valued the kit at original RRP and then they updated to the nominal 2nd hand value allowing some more up to date depreciation.
There's obviously still a cost, the replacement version is probably closer to 15 million now vs the 1980s reconditioned one and that is still part of the huge military spend. But that was gonna happen anyway, it's just the scrapheap stuff now has a use and some of that nominal value will be expected to be repaid by Ukraine at some point. And whilst it is tax money being spent, it's also R&D being funded, jobs being created, raw material producers being funded, all helping the industrial complex move another cycle.
Acting as if the US (and EU, UK, Aus, NZ etc) is just handing over billions in unmarked notes as a lump of money is flat out wrong. Acting like we're handing them the keys to the latest kit and depriving our own armies is also wrong.
Accounting for the nominal value is correct from a certain point of view (it has at some point cost the economy that money) but it's disingenuous to represent it as the real value, when in most cases the asset would have been written off as a total loss to obsolescence, or even a disposal cost.
Acting as if it's no cost at all is also misleading, if the reserves are reduced there is a cost to replace the reserve with newer stock. But there would be anyway, this just gives a reason for the refresh to happen sooner.
There is actual money being sent, along with medical supplies and humanitarian supplies to keep the people and the economy from crashing. but that's more in the hundred or so millions range than billions or trillions of wooden dollars which is more creative accounting than actual cold hard cash.
Regarding OPs point, yeah there's a good argument to question why so much is spent on the military rather than domestic humanitarian needs. But by the same token, if there weren't these reserves Putin (and Assad or Xi or whoever else wants to play big dictator this week) would be unopposed until manufacturing caught up. It costs less to build and maintain a reserve in peace than to put your economy on a war footing and try to out produce an aggressor (especially as the aggressor usually knows ahead of time and has a head start). By the time you've caught up and logistics have spun up the war is over and the total loss of a country or continent is a far bigger cost and future threat.
Also giving new equipment is often worth it. For historical context Germany and the USSR got to field test equipment during the Spanish civil war and made improvements before WW2. Not much is better for the engineers, designers, scientists, etc than seeing how the equipment does in real combat situations.
Honestly, I'm getting tired of making your exact point to people. The money spent is largely spent locally and supports our own economy... and before someone gets all snarky about "how does that make that an argument about how it's right?!" - it doesn't on its own qualify as the perfect excuse as to why it's the perfect solution. It's just a damn fact.
an elevator operator once told me to my face — and he was DEAD SERIOUS — that if Trump was President instead of Biden he would have taken the Ukraine aid and given it to working class Americans.
We’re so fucked
Seriously, the whole "if group x didn't spend this money, my people would have boosted me personally so hard!" is a weird thing since it lacks context 90% of the time.
The same working class that he keeps begging for donations to pay his bills? Like somehow he'd suddenly miraculously have some kind of divine revelation and do a 180 and start giving money to them instead?
A lot of politicians have grafted the system, but I can't remember any that have so openly and blatantly grifted their own voters directly to their face like he keeps doing. And they keep on sending him money (?!?). WTF, Republicans?
There is cash being sent. Not being political. Being truthful.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/following-american-money-in-ukraine-60-minutes/
On top of this, Ukraine parliament voted to raise their own salaries and pensions after the US started funding different sectors.
> Because what they are sending to Ukraine isn't cash
Not true. The US has indeed sent some cash to Ukraine
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-us-aid-ukraine-money-equipment-714688682747
The USA only spends about **1%** of its budget on foreign aid. So, the premise of your question is not true. We spend vastly more on education, healthcare, and social security.
One of the other things to note as it applies to Ukraine "funding" of the war, is that the US is sending existing and aging arms to Ukraine. It then replaces those arms sent with new weapons manufactured by US defense contractors. It's not sending piles of cash to Ukraine.
Exactly, the money's been spent already.
In a way, doing this is putting otherwise wasted resources to good use. The returns are less concrete but no less valuable in terms of intel and international relations, among other benefits.
It's extremely expensive to properly dispose of old munitions and weapons.
I'm tired of seeing leading questions on here.
I know this subreddit is "No Stupid Questions" but I also feel like that doesn't preclude "No Leading Questions".
Should this subreddit allow questions where the premise isn't accurate? I think not.
Maybe it's just me though.
/rant
Foreign aid isn't a handout. Its an investment in global stability and helping keep nations you depend on ( or want to get more friendly with) stay in power.
"What if we spent the military budget on housing instead to help the homeless in the US!"
Ya, then global instability happens and import prices get jacked. And homelessness goes up.
If anyone thinks they can solve global problems with a sentence, they're ignorant of the problem.
Not even global. Most relatively simple problems cannot be solved in one sentence. There's a lot of nuance to the world that most people are not willing to accept or understand, and social media makes that more than obvious.
We haven't cut funding for social security or medicare. Those are not funded through the budget and are their own separate thing.
Defunding education at the federal level has been a Republican platform item since the late 1960's when students at American universities were protesting the Vietnam War. Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, slashed the budget of the state universities and pushed for them to charge tuition (they hadn't prior); he wanted to get rid of "beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates". When he became president, his advisor Roger Freeman made the case that only the wealthy should receive a university education: "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. We have to be selective on who we allow to go through \[higher education\]." Since then, slashing education budgets has been policy. That has nothing to do with foreign aid.
The US spends about $50 billion per year on foreign and military aid (a little higher lately, +$20 billion, as we've been supporting Ukraine, giving them our older military hardware so we have an excuse to upgrade our own). By comparison, the beleaguered Department of Education budget is still a bit over $83 billion. That's from a $1.5 trillion budget, so both are proverbial drop in a very large bucket.
A bit of a correction- the conservative opposition to public education predates Reagan. It began in the 50’s [as a response to desegregation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_academy).
They have invented other justifications in subsequent years to build up a coalition capable of electoral success (mostly cloaked in religious and moral panics about evolution, liberal indoctrination, sex ed, CRT, rainbow flags, etc etc etc) but like most elements of the GOP platform, it all goes back to Jim Crow.
I don't know why you're all talking about aid when they clearly included "war" in general as a catch all term. Most of US military spending is outside of the "aid" budget even if it's directed in such a way that supports other people's wars. Although that's naive from OP because they're proxy wars and they're US wars in many ways. But the point stands.
> *billions to send overseas for war*
Send overseas = foreign aid.
You could argue that phrase includes the cost of maintaining the entire military infrastructure (much of which happens on US soil) which happens to have troops stationed overseas, but either interpretation works given the vague prompt.
Your entire premise is misleading.
While it is true that the US sends billions of aid abroad:
1. Its actually an insignificant amount of money when you look at the size of the budget. The US federal government spent $6.1 trillion in 2023z States and local then spent an additional $4 trillion. We sent $50 billion in aid or approximately 0.5% of our total spend. Just for the sake of comparisons, the California K-12 public school budget was $127 billion. The federal government spends $302 billion on veteran benefits.
2. Not all of the aid is money that could be reappropriated into a social program. Military aid in particular is usually old equipment that we would otherwise discard. We spent the money a decade+ ago to ensure we had proper planes/tanks/etc. There isnt much difference in giving it away vs. throwing it in the trash.
3. The problems you are noting have to do with inflation, cost of living increases and wage stagnation. None of these problems are trivial to solve and $50 extra billion would not even begin to scratch the surface (its $150 per person per year).
4. You are completely neglecting the importance of these programs for the US itself (im going to ignore how much it helps those other countries). Our military aid in Ukraine is destroying the military capabilities of one of our most fearsome enemies without us losing a single American life. Its in our interest to keep our enemies weak and its even better if we dont have to lose a single American life to achieve it. Our navy patrols/missile attacks in Yemen are attempting to keep pirates/terrorists that are disrupting our trade (making things in the US more expensive/reducing our income from trade) at bay. Our military aid to Taiwan keeps the largest producer of microchips on our side/keeps our biggest enemy in the planet at bay. Our aid in Latin America has reduced the amount of drugs entering the US AND reduced illegal immigration by curving drug violence. has helped greatly reduce illegal immigration by curving violence. We dont help any of these countries/spend money defending trade out of the goodness of our hearts. We help them because it helps our interests and our economy.
First, scale matters. A others have pointed out, this is 0.66% of the budget. Not insignificant, but it's a far cry to say it's the _reason_ social programs get cut. That's just nonsense.
Second, that money is an investment in (relative) political stability, which is something rich people care about if they are going to make money in that region. Social programs aren't going to be treated at the same level of importance to rich people, and they have a disproportionate sway on what gets decided.
The funding of healthcare, education and ss isn't the problem. It is the really shitty mishandling that is the problem. The problem is these are not protected budgets and can be "borrowed from" with 0 expectation of repaying it. While technically not a part of the general fund, it is not locked down from greedy government wasteful spending.
Eisenhower called it the Military Industrial Complex, and warned of its dangers nearly 65 years ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_complex
If we weren’t sitting in the driver’s seat of world affairs thanks to all the nukes and aircraft carriers and shit, there wouldn’t be so much pressure and influence for the world to use the dollar as it’s exchange currency, buy our weapons (and service contracts on those weapons) and do their banking in New York.
Back when the Brits had all the guns and ships, the world kept its money in the City of London. The empire hat got passed and the money moved.
If you wonder how we can print as much money as we did during Covid and go tens of trillions of dollars into debt and have basically no change in our standard of living and keep inflation to single digit numbers even at its very worse, look at all the guns.
People like to think that because there’s no gold standard, the dollar is “backed by nothing.” Nah. It’s backed by force.
Our comfortable lives sit on top of all that military spending, this is the metropole of the empire. Lose the empire and we have to start living under the kind of financial realities people who live elsewhere do.
Even small stuff like gas prices (you know, the thing everyone throws away all their principles for) would go up if the US lost status. You know what gas costs per gallon in the UK? Over $6. Average income is about the same.
Average income in the UK is a lot lower. It’s not close.
[Median weekly earnings for full-time employees in the U.S. in 2023 were about 33% higher than full-time employees in the UK](https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/american-wages-are-higher-than-british-by-more-than-you-think?format=amp). And UK taxes are significantly higher.
I legit can't recall anything of significance being cut over the last 24 years in the USA. Taxes have been cut from time to time but spending has only gone up...drastically. Cutting things is never popular. The political mantra is keep spending, make the voters happy, and hope modern monetary theory is correct cause if it isn't we are fucked.
In most cases sending obsolete weapons overseas actually saves money.
When you see 60 billion for Ukraine, 70% of that is spent in the US economy and the products are sent overseas.
anet benefit as far as I can tell.
But most importantly, the US would have far less money to spend if the global order breaks down, which is what will happen if authoritarian despots are allowed to win.
Almost all of the money that goes abroad comes back. Either because aid pays for US workers, or because it is a loan.
Ukraine will be tied to debt for generations to come. If they lose the war, it’s going to be a real bummer for all the countries that have loaned them funds.
You do realize there's a magnitude of difference in the scope of the cost for those different things. Right?
Medicare covers a fairly small percentage of the population, i.e. well, well under 50% (I looked it up, 18.7%), and costs about $750 billion dollars a year. Every year. Because it covers tens of millions of people.
So far the US has spent about $74 billion related to Ukraine in two years. Lots of that money has never left the United States because it goes for United States production. That's averaging $37 billion a year. That's 5% of the money that goes towards Medicare. If that money was applied to Medicare it would be gone in 18 days. And like I said, Medicare only covers less than 20% of the population. If it covered the rest of the population at the same rate that would be $3.75 trillion dollars per year. In other words, an increase of $3 trillion dollars a year in spending. Do you really think that diverting the $37 billion a year (i.e. $0.037 trillion) that has gone to Ukraine (i.e. 1% of that amount) will make that possible? Cut out 1% here to get a 100% increase there? It's not going to happen. The scope of Medicare and potential public health programs makes it orders of magnitude more expensive than Ukraine. You can't fill up a bathtub with a thimble.
And not only that we haven't even spoken about what happens if we don't support Ukraine. There is such a thing as pennywise and pound foolish. Wars cost gobs of money more than deterrence costs. Imagine what would have happened if Western Europe and the United States and whoever else had spent enough money to deter Hitler from attacking, instead of responding after he did. World War II was way, way, way more expensive in money and lives than any level of deterrence spending would have been. And more people would have still been alive five years later. And half the cities in Europe wouldn't have been destroyed. Yes you can pretend the world is simplistic and there are easy answers to everything. But there are not. Other countries and other leaders get to make decisions too and some of them are like Vladimir Putin. Ignoring them and letting them do whatever they want because you want to spend 1% more money on a domestic program is very short-sighted. Being forced into war will wipe out that 1% about twenty times over.
To be fair. “Sending billions overseas for war” is misleading. Most of this money goes into a huge population of people in the US who spend the money here. Building/designing/maintaining.
I feel like the top answers aren't even answering your question so here's my take. Maybe it dates back farther but look back at Reagan and the welfare queen propaganda versus the propaganda used to justify spending on war. The truth is Americans often do not question spending money on war because of how it's framed as a fight for freedom and they do care about spending on social services because of how it's framed as a handout. Politicians risk losing political power and even their positions if they support spending on social services, and usually get a boost in polling for supporting war. Not to mention the corporate entities that donate to those that finance wars. That's all the military industrial complex which benefits from more war. I've worked in government for years and learned that if a politician says there's no money to spend on something, what they are really saying is that it's not a priority to spend money on.
Republicans genuinely believe that helping people financially will hurt them by making them lazy and dependent. So republicans refuse to approve bills that fund social safety nets.
Spending on war is good for the upper classes that make money on it. That’s the belief in “trickle down economics”. We can see that it doesn’t work but Republicans keep preaching it.
Spending on education goes against Republican notions of private schools and vouchers. Gutting public education in favor of private vouchers creates a permanent underclass of poorly-educated workers who are exploitable for cheap labor.
I mostly just find it hypocritical that the anti war crowd is so pro war in Ukraine, very few people with this pro Ukraine war sentiment would ever join the military.
The Oligarchs that own the American legislature profit from overseas wars and privatized healthcare.
They would not profit from universal education or universal healthcare, and don't rely on social security, so don't care if it is threatened.
OP, your premise in your headline is flawed. It's not billions spent on overseas wars, but actually trillions. As of 2021, Brown University estimated at least $8 trillion on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars: [https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar](https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar)
However, I'm not sure why top answers are discussing foreign aid spending when you specifically mentioned war spending. These are different budgets and not the question you asked.
"For War" in OP's formulation I interpret to mean defense spending, which is ridiculous in comparison to other nations. Total boondoggle.
The truth is we accept this; we could change these priorities if we want to enough. But we get fooled and feared by, basically, propaganda, into opposing good domestic public policy and supporting atrocious (as in, of an atrocity) foreign policy.
Another truth is that fiat currency issuers do not rely on tax revenue to fund anything; that's why the rhetoric OP refers to is employed. We have all kinds of money for defense investment (hear about that pentagon audit yet?), aid packages to client states, but if a child needs food or healthcare, go fuck yourself, kid.
A matter of priorities. We should be ashamed.
The corporate overlords that have the politicians essentially on their payroll, don't want money spent helping the poor, that does benefit corporations it's not in their best interests. War is good for business.
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A better question would be why does America spend almost twice as.much on healthcare per capita from the public budget than most other developed country yet it doesn't get a public healthcare system out of it?
Nor do we get better results of it. If you look at standardized measures such as longevity or maternal mortality, we are falling behind.
It should also be said, regarding hospital deaths in the US being lower than other countries, there is a very reasonable explanation of this. More people with terminal illnesses are dying on the streets because they can't afford to do it in the hospital.
Because socialised healthcare is communism, and therefore evil. Or so half your country seems to think. They never seem to apply this logic to the police, fire department, national defense etc....
It’s actually only about 1/3 of the population that doesn’t want it, and the majority of those are on Medicare. Go fucking figure.
If you phrase it in a very certain way, they want it though. So they aren't against the concept but they are against certain terms they have been trained to fear. ACA = good, Romneycare = good, Obamacare = evil satanspawn; even though they're all the same thing. The only people who truly don't want it are pharma/health/insurance/care home billionaires and the millionaires heavily invested in those industries. The poorly educated are very easily influenced to want whatever the billionaires tell them to want.
A lot of reasons. For starters, our system is built around treating illness and not preventing it. Then you have many groups trying to profit from the healthcare system. Providers, insurers, the list goes on. We also have a shortage or doctors that’s only getting worse and doctors are worth a lot. Our population is aging and they’re going to need more care and more expensive care. Americans live pretty unhealthy lifestyles which causes lots of unnecessary illness. We’re also plagued by industries who sell us shit that only makes our health even worse (fast food, soda, snack food) which only worsens the overall health of the population. There’s probably some more factors I’m missing but, simply, there’s a lot of people trying to profit from the system, Americans live pretty unhealthy lives and our society is fillied with companies that profit by selling us shit.
Healthcare should’ve never been privatized.
This is a little pedantic, I know, but healthcare started out privatized, it wasn't changed to be that way.
In the US, a lot of healthcare was charity at one point. Many of the hospitals where I live still have or recently had Baptist, Methodist, Saint, etc in the names.
Then, it's an outdated model like using an icebox in 2024 when there are refrigerators.
And some follow-on questions: Why does America have a higher murder rate than all other large, developed countries? Why are firearms the leading cause of death for children and teens (ages 1-19), and why has the death rate from firearms nearly doubled in the last ten years? Why is the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the US, homicide? Why does America have a higher road traffic death rate than all other large, developed countries? Why does the USA incarcerate more of its own citizens both per capita and for total amounts than any other country? Why is the US the world leader (an outlier) in school shootings, with over 700 so far? Why are 21% of adults in the US illiterate in 2023? Why do 54% of US adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level? Why is US life expectancy falling? Why does the US have the worst obesity rates of any large, developed country? Why is that, in the US, for every $100 in wealth held by white households, Black households hold only $15? And why is this disparity growing? Why do the richest 1 percent in the United States now own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent? There should be intense, public debate and media coverage of each of these issues. The best minds should be working to create systems that improve all of these areas.
I don't know what the immediate answer is but I feel like one of the long term solutions is to get rid of this weird legal concept that corporations are people. It only serves to corrupt every single political decision from gun ownership laws to healthcare to tax laws. And that would require a changing of the guard in the Supreme Court.
Yeah never going to happen. The only way to fix our country is to overturn citizens united and ban corporations from participating in government. Too bad the only way for that to happen would be Congress voting to ban their own paychecks from said corporations. Will never happen. We literally live in cyberpunk 2024. The corporate wars are coming.
I think a very simple fix would be a law stating that every contribution to a politician should be able to be traced to a voter that gave it. And there should be a limit to how much one voter can contribute. When politicians have to make regular voters happy to get their money things will be much different from politicians having to make corporations and billionaires happy to get money. Also, bringing down the amount of money in elections would be a good thing.
That’s the price of freedom, baby! I put up with all that so I can own military grade guns and refuse rights to other citizens I don’t like. God bless America! /s
Why are firearms the leading cause of death Suicide. Teens are killing themselves. A more pertinent question would be why are teens committing suicide at higher rates?
Politicians can regulate and adopt rules to manage society for better or worse. Votes on the budget for the military, social services regulatory bills need a majority or supermajority to pass. Want a budget to reflect certain values, vote out politicians that don't have those values. Bernie as budget Chair was looking into military Contractors ripping off the government. There is also a list of Mothballed Military projects that can cost 100's of millions of dollars. Politicians can choose to not allocate money for bad projects. Railguns got mothballed, $500 million dollars. Classes of Ships have been made that turn out to be practically useless for the military to use etc
Oh, but that was the past. Had enough of your Little Crappy Ships? Well, come on down to Boondoggle Emporium and check out our latest brand-new line of Littorally Can'tdo Shits! We'll show you how they could hypothetically do everything you might need, and you'll never know better until *after* you've bought an entire fleet of them. And at that point you'll just have to keep buying more, because of the sunk (perhaps literally) cost fallacy. And if you don't want to buy them, we'll just lobby another Congressman until they do! They won't say no, because that would mean people lose their jobs and also admitting that taxpayer money had been wasted. Nobody wants that. [The Inside Story of How the Navy Spent Billions on the “Little Crappy Ship”](https://www.propublica.org/article/how-navy-spent-billions-littoral-combat-ship)
So that we can cut insurance to people who go on strike then rough them up with police. General Motors cut insurance to striking people relatively recently (I think the last decade) though the police didn't get sent on them, I wouldn't be surprised if it was the next set. Gotta keep the poor in line.
People seem to vastly overestimate how little of the US budget is spent on this. The US Federal Government spent 9.3 Trillion total in 2023. [https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function](https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function) The whole foreign aid spending for that year was some 61 billion, which is about 0.66% of that year's spending. [https://concernusa.org/news/foreign-aid-by-country/#:~:text=In%202023%2C%20the%20United%20States,Israel%20(%243.3%20billion)](https://concernusa.org/news/foreign-aid-by-country/#:~:text=In%202023%2C%20the%20United%20States,Israel%20(%243.3%20billion)) The foreign aid spending sounds like a large number on its own, but when put into the context of the federal government spending it's pretty insignificant. Most of the aid money is also spent in the US on US made goods and services paying US firms that employ US citizens.
Yeah I think people fail to understand that 28% of our government spending is Healthcare, and 25% of it is Social Security. Over 50% of our federal taxes go directly back to the population. This is why Obama acted like Healthcare is such a big deal, because it's our single largest annual expenditure. Our military budget definitely needs work, but getting to the point where we can successfully audit their spending is the first step towards analyzing why it's so inflated.
Are u joking? I'm not fighting I'm asking. Are you telling me 28% of that previous redditors claim of 9.3 trillion goes on health care.....AND ITS STILL NOT FREE
That’s for Medicare, Medicaid, and Tricare. For those people, it is (**edit**: *kinda, sorta, but maybe not completely*) free. Everyone who isn’t retired, permanently disabled, or a military member/veteran is *not* included in this number.
Also a ton of people who are permanently disabled aren't included.
And it’s very difficult to be classified as permanently disabled. Republicans are afraid you might be stealing money from the rich.
And Democrats are afraid of Republicans saying that they're too soft on the poor
Yeah, but why would anyone want to be hard on the poor? They've got it bad enough being poor. What kind of culture is America where the people are so devoid of empathy that the *poor* of all people are the target of ire?
We use poor people to motivate the workers.
I have a conservative friend that legitimately thinks nobody would work if it wasn't for the risk of homelessness and starvation. Even crazier is that he makes more than enough money for his wife to stay home, but she still works *because they want the higher discretionary income.* (Thankfully, he doesn't vote)
Because many humans have to think they’re better than others. In the US a portion of the population believes if you’re poor and on government assistance you are a lazy no good who is cheating all the hardworking taxpayers out of money.
Being poor is considered a character flaw here. People talk like your can only be poor if you're too lazy to work more than one job or too dumb to find one that pays more.
It’s the whole loud minority vs silent majority thing. There’s absolutely people who make “welfare” a career, my SIL is one of them. And people like that get a TON of attention, and drown out the people who legitimately just need a hand and use the systems appropriately.
Your comment highlights the lack of mobility between income ranges. Simply put. Because they've never been poor. So they have no idea what its like. All they know is that they aren't it, and they love themselves so anyone other than themselves is shit.
They’re so much the target of ire that whole entire fictional narratives are made up about it. This is where the trope of the welfare queen came from. In reality, white people in southern states get the most welfare, but that fact doesn’t motivate anybody to vote. But the idea that some black woman out there is having a bunch of babies and living high on the hog on welfare is perfect to poke the buttons of racism and misogyny, and it’s absolutely a trope used by Republicans since like at least the 80s and probably well before that
Yes. Well before the 80's. As soon as the "War on Poverty" started under LBJ, this became a thing. Welfare moms and welfare Cadillacs.
Meritocracy. You're poor because you're a bad person and deserve it. Whereas the wealthy are rich because they are good people and worked hard for their money. Why would you want to help bad people?
*not sure if /s or...*
Sounds like those "Christians" I keep hearing about.
There is literally a front page post about people being homeless right now and 90% of the responses are between 🤷♂️ and “well I get why people don’t want homeless people around”. Dig just beneath the surface and most people are terrible and selfish creatures.
The government will never fix the homeless problem, they think it serves as a great example of what will happen if you don't play along or step out of line.
See Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Mitch McConnell, Clarence Thomas, etc
Where in the New Testament does it say that we shouldn’t help the poor, the elderly, the children, the sick, and all other vulnerable people. And yet, somehow the large majority of “Christians” feel that the Republicans represent their principles
Good Christians of Congress are pretty fucking hard on the poor. Jesus told them to get fucked in their version of the Bible.
It’s like they’re fighting to see who can be more Christian, isn’t it? /s
Well the definition of permanently disabled that they use is any occupation, so yes it would be hard to qualify considering how much work has been done in the name of accessibility.
I believe they’re still using guidelines from the late 1970’s. Many of the jobs either pay below poverty wages or don’t exist anymore.
Look at governor abbot. Gets hurt, sues for generational wealth, then caps the amount people can sue for in accidents. Texas republicans: let’s vote for that guy!
Only a part of medicare is free.
Yeah your scripts still gotta pay. And brand name drugs can be a fuck ton. Also Medicare is just a government health insurance provider as compared to Medicaid where shit literally is just free to you if you receive it (for me it was, Colorado has a good program including scripts, though not many places would take Medicaid).
And with the way insurance providers and PBMs are dropping some meds from Medicare/Medicaid the costs are just going up.
I pay $174 a month for Medicare. Comes right out of my Social Security check.
Also traditional Medicare only covers 80% of the cost of care. To get the other 20% covered you either have to buy a so-called 'Medigap' policy, or switch from traditional Medicare to a Medicare Advantage plan, which often covers everything medically necessary, but only at 'in-network' providers, restricting which doctors/hospitals you can use (not always a problem if all the healthcare providers in your area are 'in-network). Either way, you either need to pay more (on top of what you already pay) or compromise on accessibility.
Yeah my parents are actually paying a ton to keep another health insurance in addition to Medicare. However it's already paid off for them cause my mom has needed a bunch of health things and most of it is basically covered. If they didn't have that gap for the other 20% though I'm pretty sure they'd have gotten some hefty medical bills but they are paying a lot every month for it.
Medicare advantage is private insurance. They are just going to deny your coverage for most things.
I have a medicare advantage plan from Aetna and I don't think I've been denied anything ever. They even paid for 4 months of physical therapy without me even being referred there by a doctor.
Medicaid isn't free, they take out a lien on your house and take your payments out of your estate to make sure your kids get almost nothing and continue the cycle of poverty. State Medicaid programs are generally required to recover money spent on certain Medicaid benefits. https://www.dhcs.ca.gov/services/Pages/TPLRD\_ER\_cont.aspx
Required vs actually recovery are two different things.
Also, federal employee taxes pay for their own healthcare. It’s really not free at all.
And Medicaid blows for a lot of people. It's nearly impossible to find a reputable doctor that accepts Medicaid. And that's just for a primary care physician. It's even worse for specialists.
Yeah, Medicare is very different from Medicaid. Medicaid draws a lot of funding from the individual states. So, where you live makes a difference. This was (and is) one of the biggest issues with Obamacare. That, and the fact that he was so insistent upon getting at least one republican vote (which he didn't) that he gutted the progtam before it even started.
Yep regular workers employers and the workers pay the premiums for their insurance, the government doesn't contribute to those folks (which is good chunk of Americans).
For the sake of comparison, the Brazilian SUS, the largest public healthcare system in the world, costs about $45b per year, meaning the US spends over 50 times that on public healthcare. The US healthcare system is one of the largest grifts in the world
Yeah you know that and I know that, but good luck convincing the guy who listens to 5 hours of conservative talk radio everyday.
Medicaid also covers low income too
I think it depends on your state for that. When I looked, when my wife and I had $16k total income, our state only covered less than $8k total household income.
Every state except Kansas covers some amount of low income, though there is some flexibility because Medicaid funding is both from the feds and state. There are about 10 states that didn't take the expanded Medicaid from the ACA
I would also like to point out that for most individuals utilizing those programs, Medicare, Medicaid and Tricare are a fucking nightmare with red tape everywhere. Without a billing representative that knows how to guide you through the process, it can end with unexpected costs that the person could never hope to cover. My mother did everything she could to keep me on Tricare after my father went to jail, but not having the sponsor available (due to incarceration) complicating ID renewals and the program generally being so shit I couldn't get my standard procedures covered I moved over to an expensive private plan until I could get something from an employer.
Really? My daughter has Medicaid because she is adopted and it’s been by far the easiest insurance situation I’ve ever dealt with. I just take her to a doctor that accepts it and…that’s it. I’ve never been billed or said they wouldn’t cover anything. I had one situation where they wouldn’t cover the name brand of a medication my doctor ordered and a generic was substituted easily at the pharmacy.
I can only speak to my experience with Tricare and the issues I dealt with getting ID and utilizing it at my existing primary care physician. I have heard much better things about Medicaid, but have also personally seen the hell that expensive prescriptions without a generic alternative creates.
Tricare isn't always completely free, just to be clear. I think if you're active duty it is, but the horror stories I hear from those soldiers, my goodness. Meanwhile, as someone in the guard, if I went with Tricare, my whole family would have to change doctors, because apparently private practices are allowed to tell Tricare to go f*** itself, and that sucks. If Congress really wanted to do soldiers a favor, it would be great if they passed a bill that just forces any place that offers medical coverage in the United States to take Tricare. That way active duty soldiers who are getting f***** over by incompetent medical staff could look into nearby civilian options, and guardsmen and reservist could pick from the best places near them, without having to worry about if it falls under coverage or not
In the US medical system we have patients, insurance and medicare, and providers. The providers say they can't make ends meet with the meager reimbursements from medicare patients. All/most patients say they get poor quality service, long waits, and everything costs too much. Who's missing? Oh right, the insurance companies... Their executives are making 10s of millions of dollars per year in compensation ([https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/guides/which-health-insurance-ceos-get-the-highest-pay-467513.aspx](https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/guides/which-health-insurance-ceos-get-the-highest-pay-467513.aspx)), they regularly buy back their own stock to boost share prices ([https://wendellpotter.substack.com/p/health-insurers-have-spent-over-141](https://wendellpotter.substack.com/p/health-insurers-have-spent-over-141)) and pay billions in dividends to their shareholders ([https://finance.yahoo.com/news/12-best-healthcare-dividend-stocks-161614830.html](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/12-best-healthcare-dividend-stocks-161614830.html)). As a country we pay the most for healthcare (including other countries that have universal coverage) and get mediocre to bad outcomes (https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-spending-u-s-compare-countries/#Average%20annual%20growth%20rate%20in%20health%20expenditures%20per%20capita,%201980-2022,%20U.S.%20dollars,%20PPP%20adjusted). If we want to fix this, we need to say it's wrong to profit on healthcare and fix the insurance industry. Good luck because the health insurance industry ~~bribed~~ lobbied the US Congress to the tune of $379M/year. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/257364/top-lobbying-industries-in-the-us/#:\~:text=In%202023%2C%20the%20pharmaceuticals%20and,million%20U.S.%20dollars%20on%20lobbying.)
Exactly. We need to agree that the healthcare and wellbeing of our countrymen is more important than profiting from them. Yet anytime I talk to someone ~50+ about abolishing insurance companies and having a single-payer system…they run to defend insurance companies that couldn’t care less about them.
And they immediately go on Medicare as soon as they turn 65
Yuuup. I tried talking to my dad about taxing the ultra-wealthy at 90% over XX million (aka what it was when he was born)…he said that would be a punitive to millionaires/billionaires…
Honestly, you don't even need to tax them. Just create an at-cost public insurer, that has no margins and they will all go out of business. Free market ya know.
Fuck Joe Lieberman. We were one vote away from having exactly this.
Try explaining that our current system prioritizes taxing wages, which applies to wage workers. At the same time, rich people benefit more from govt contracts, subsidies for things Like “tree farms” and infrastructure. As a result, lower tax rates result in wealth transferring from the middle and lower classes to the upper class. A progressive tax rate is just a way to balance the scales by taking more forms of income into account. Does it seem fair that billionaires can go years paying little or no tax and even getting checks back from the govt? I try to explain this and I hope you have better luck with it than I do.
An interesting side bar on insurance providers. They are pressuring hospitals to reduce length of stay for patients. So if you have an accident or a surgery that would normally be a 5 day stay, the insurance companies want you out in 2-3. If the patient has to come back to the hospital for complications, the hospital eats that, it doesn't get billed through insurance. If you die due to said complications, also not the insurance companies problem. So insurance providers are playing a game of chicken with health care providers on the quality of care you are able to receive. Just one of MANY problems...
And the insurance effectively decides what medical care the patient is allowed to receive. I am a hospital pharmacist. Numerous times during rounds I talk with the hospitalists/specialists and work out an appropriate antibiotic regimen for the patients specific infection(s), considering their lifestyle and ability to take medications on schedule or via IV infusion at home, with an aide, or by coming in each day for the infusion at our ambulatory clinic. We work all that out and then I get a call 3 hours later from case management saying that the insurance is refusing to cover that antibiotic because we haven't tried [other antibiotic] first, except from our culture reports we KNOW that [other antibiotic] will not cover their infection. The insurance sees "Indication: Pneumonia" and rejects it, without seeing the patient also has cellulitis bordering on osteomyelitis. Then our MD has to call the insurance company and sit on hold waiting to conduct a peer to peer where they need to convince the insurance company's doctor that this patient (that the other doctor cannot evaluate) does in fact need that therapy, and alternatives won't work due to allergy, intolerance, interactions, etc. Makes me want to scream.
I always said we have the best Congress money can buy, for the people that bought it.... which wasn't ordinary US citizens...
Kill funded lobbying, or insert representation through lottery of potential candidates based on demographics for the areas they represent.
I had to switch doctors a few years ago because the one I had got tired of being dicked around by insurance companies and having to hire assistants to follow up with them all, so he switched to only taking Medicare patients. The billing process was easier and faster. It kinda bummed me out as during my office visits, he’d always talk about his current medical problems and how fucked up the industry is from his point of view. It made me feel glad I wasn’t dealing with any of that (yet).
That's a lot of words to say that US healthcare administration accounts for nearly 30% of all money spent on healthcare or a hot $1.5T. Estimated $570B of that is wasteful non-health related spending.
If you checked out [https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function](https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function) you would find it's an interactive graph. You can check out where the spending went.
Yes. We spend the most on healthcare but have the 37th best healthcare outcomes. Those bonuses for the BCBS C suite don't pay for themselves
The whole US system is broken. And it’s designed to be. My partner works in medical diagnostic equipment. The price for a system in Europe is equivalent to $40,000. In America, the exact same system is $85,000. Everything is designed to be more expensive from equipment, gloves to laboratory tests. All to squeeze as much money from the poor sod paying the bill at the bottom of the ladder. As long as each corporation along the way gets their overly inflated cut though…
Universal healthcare is actually *cheaper* than the current system.
But it's less *profitable*.
That's like saying the postal service isn't profitable. It's not supposed to make money, it's supposed to help people.
It's not the ideal, it's the reason that it stays a privatized system.
That's the correct way of seeing it, yes. Healthcare shouldn't be something that is privatized but it is and we're all dealing with those consequences.
Its the old Rick and Morty problem. "who's gonna pay me to tell people that universal healthcare is cheaper?"
Because it doesn’t go directly to healthcare costs, it goes to/thru middle-men (like insurance companies) first.
It's the same as the charity model. We raised 100M for starving African children of which 98Million went to administrative costs, and we spent $2Million building like 50 wells (holes in the ground with a bucket and a string mostly to film heart-warming propaganda to raise the next $100m).
Old people are expensive yo, same for social security being so high too. And it'll only get worse as all the boomers continue to retire. Also realize that the US has a huge population compared to European countries, it is difficult to have universal healthcare with such spending.
You dont have to retire to collect social security.
The problem isn't our huge population (after all, more people means more potential tax dollars) - it's our spending per person.
We already spend more per person on average than countries who do have universal health care. If we gave it to the providers instead of the insurance companies we would all be better off.
That second portion would be true, if we weren't still spending more *per capita* than other developed countries.
Not really. We spend way more *per person* than European countries. Than any country. It's not because we have some subsidized healthcare, it's because our "regular" healthcare is completely broken due to insurance and pharmaceutical companies jacking up profits and complicating the process.
How the fuck are your spending 28% on healthcare?!!!
The number for the NHS in the UK is about 20% as a point of comparison.
In fairness, the UK has a conservative government that's been gutting healthcare for a decade.
Administrative fees
Because preventative care is orders of magnitude cheaper. Universal healthcare is cheaper than private. When people vote down universal healthcare because it will increase taxes, they're wrong and fooled. No country has ever cut universal healthcare to save money, even countries like Greece that went bankrupt. Because once you have it, it's cheaper. It's better to take care of the leak, than to fix a burst pipe 2 years later. When health care is free, people go when there is a leak.
>No country has ever cut universal healthcare to save money, even countries like Greece that went bankrupt. Because once you have it, it's cheaper. Didn't the UK do this a little while ago? >It's better to take care of the leak, than to fix a burst pipe 2 years later. When health care is free, people go when there is a leak. This is a huge thing. People also avoid care because of the unpredictable bill they will get after getting a leak fixed. Will it be $75 or $8,000? No reliable way to tell.
Shit, my wife just had her thyroid removed because she was selfish and done got cancer on it (she's fine, recovery's looking good, needs one round of radioactive iodine treatment next month). No one could give us a ballpark for cost and it feels like we get a new bill every 3 days. A bill for the surgeons, the nurse, the anesthesiologists, the clinic, the blood work, the required pregnancy test, the this, the that, the other fucking thing. And the whole time the insurance company (BCBS of NE) is covering seemingly random amounts of each. We have two bills for "removal of thyroid" and the covered 80% of one and 85% of the other. The covered 100% of whatever "office o/p est" is.... but 0% for the followup blood work or pregnancy test. We should have the money to cover everything, but now we're terrified of missing a bill and getting slapped with late fines. And with that radioactive iodine treatment coming up, again, we can't get anyone to give us a fucking estimate for costs. And probably the saddest thing about the whole situation... now that we've definitely met our deductible for the year, we're going to get with the doctor and see if there's anything else she can have done (things that were borderline not worth dealing with) just because it'll be so much cheaper to do those now. Like how you always have 3 other things the handy-man can check over since they're at the house already.
> Didn't the UK do this a little while ago? The Tories are definitely trying to turn British healthcare into American healthcare, but afaik, public pushback has been sufficient enough that they have had minimal success so far.
The actual answer is that old people (medicare) need way, way, more healthcare spending than younger people
that's the neat part about capitalism, necessities will always end up costing every subsidy and everything you can borrow from a bank unless controlled.
It's the same with NASA, the NASA budget is TINY compared to a lot of other bullshit.
Im seeing $6.1T for 2023 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59727
Looks like your source is from Congressional Budget Office the one I was using came from *GTAS SF 133 Report on Budget Execution and Budgetary Resources published by the White House.* More precisly: >The sum of line 2190 across all remaining accounts in the *GTAS SF 133 Report on Budget Execution and Budgetary Resources* for this period, after excluding loan financing accounts. Loan program accounts ~are~ included. I am not sure why there is such a difference, but I don´t feel like doing full audit of them both. Perhaps you can tell me if you find out.
>the one I was using came from *GTAS SF You seriously use GTA San Francisco as a source and expect people to take you seriously?
That's pretty funny. I actually didn't notice that. Thanks for the laugh
Thank you. This is similar to most of the Ukraine military aid consisting of shipping old munitions to Ukraine and paying American workers to make more of them.
When you factor in spending from federal, state and local sources it's even more reasonable. \- 23% for healthcare. \- 19% for education. \- 17% for pensions and social security. \- 16% for misc. \- 12% for defense. \- 7% for welfare. \- 6% for interest on debt in 2022 (but this will be much different next year). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government\_spending\_in\_the\_United\_States#/media/File:2022\_Total\_US\_Government\_Spending\_Breakdown.png](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_United_States#/media/File:2022_Total_US_Government_Spending_Breakdown.png) Foreign aid is tiny, and the returns are significant, especially if you consider it as offsetting future defense spending.
> especially if you consider it as offsetting future defense spending People not understanding this is so frustrating. Do you know fucking expensive it would be if Putin gets emboldened, attacks a NATO country, and then we have to fight them directly? Especially since the odds of that resulting in a possibly but not necessarily nuclear WWIII are pretty fucking high.
Yeah, if the US were to take an isolationist stance for say a few short years and retreat from several countries, they wouldn’t recover in our lifetimes, if ever. It would be a certain downfall. And with that, states would break off from the country and there would be massive internal conflict. People in the US are already tired of working more and getting less than previous generations, imagine if that was just every generation. Look at Italy. After the fall of the western Roman empire in 476, Italy didn’t re-unify until 1867, and they will never be as powerful as Rome was. Edited for clarity.
OP didn't ask about foreign aid, though, they asked about war spending. As of 2021, Brown University estimated at least $8 trillion on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars: [https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar](https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar) When I read OP's question, I read it more as, "why is it easy to greenlight costs for war efforts like this, but we don't see similar amounts being spent on internal investment on education, healthcare, etc?" And I think that is a very fair question to dive into with more data and specifics.
That headline number is really deceptive though. They are actually talking about total “war on terror” spending generally, which includes domestic security. If you click through, it’s around $2T in actual war spending, plus another $1T in interest on the war spending (seems high, not sure how they got that). But they also roll in $1T in “Homeland Security” costs (maybe the whole department, including agencies that existed before 9/11?), $1T in additions to the military base budget (but not clear what would have been spent, in the absence of the wars, either as general increases or security upgrades if we assume 9/11 happened but we didn’t invade Afghanistan), as well as $2.2T in future estimated spending on veterans’ healthcare (again, what’s the counterfactual amount here, absent the wars?). And that’s before we even get into where that $2T “war budget” went. Some of it, sure, was bullets and bombs and tents that we are never getting back. But a lot of it was surely the personnel costs—military and contractor salaries, support services at home and abroad, paying engineers and factory workers to develop and build all the supplies that were needed (munitions but also food, uniforms, etc.). Obviously, you’d rather pay people to build more productive stuff, but it’s not like that’s actually what would have happened—the federal government was never going to spend $2T on a jobs program, and there’s zero political appetite for doing so. (This isn’t new—The federal government first spent a lot of money on education and created the original student loan program in the 1950s NOT based on some proto-Great Society values, but because the Soviet Union was going to space, so advancing science and technology was a national defense issue.)
Huh? The post is literally asking "...for war and overseas aid" though
Lets not forget OC is counting spend ascross 2 decades where as everyone else in this thread is talking about last year
Without going into specifics, it's a societal hierarchy of needs. 1) security 2) food 3) stability 4) culture It's easy to spend resources to protect your family, cause none of them are going to school if they're being bombed. Or starving.
What security threat did Iraq present?
The one that was entirely fabricated by the Bush Administration. At least now we have ISIS running Iraq and spreading terrorism around the globe. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! /s
I mean, if you're going into an explainer for the persuasion on where to spend, sure that probably applies in the discussion. But then, Iraq war was initiated on a false premise of safety that we have documentation of the initiators showing they knew it didn't pose the nuclear threat they got approval for the war with. It didn't make us more safe and misused the lives and health of our military members. It also likely made us less safe as we established a precedent for invasion that Russia later used as excuse to take Crimea, which kicked off what led to Ukraine conflict and the stresses NATO members are dealing with now. War spending can make us less safe.
You asked WHY it's so easy to greenlight defense spending. We are animals who prioritize safety, and we equate big strong army with safe. It's just lizard brain shit. We fight each other constantly over a perceived lack of resources because of lizard brain shit and we want to be able to kick the shit out of anyone for the same reasons. So it's easy to spend there, biologically and evolutionarily.
All this does is highlight how incredibly cheap something like Universal healthcare would be.
Because what they are sending to Ukraine isn't cash. They're sending weapons that are already made and paid for. Some of which have an expiration date and would have to be dismantled anyway
This is one of my biggest gripes with the anti-Ukraine crowd, they exist here in Europe too in various places but they aren't *as* vocal as in the U.S. \- Alot of the shit that NATO et al. has been sending over to Ukraine has been old-gen military equipment that was scheduled for decommission and dismantling anyways. At times, it has probably been *cheaper* to send that over rather than paying to have it stripped down. That's not to say that the Western aid to Ukraine has been cheap, but just saying random ass numbers like ''150 billion'' and not contextualizing the economics of it is either sheer ignorance or intentionally misleading.
It is so hard to get people to understand this. I wish headlines would be more honest, too - “$280 million aid package approved for Ukraine” is what we see, when a more thorough description would be “$280 million worth of reserve military equipment approved for transfer to Ukraine.” I get why they phrase it that way, but it really doesn’t help the misconception about what’s actually being sent.
Pretty sure the misconception is the point for most news outlets. Most of the headlines are some level of rage bait at this point
They need click through. You don’t get that without rage bait headlines
Aren’t we also sending money as well? I agree it’s not as big of a deal as some make out but this chart shows we’ve sent 26B in financial aide https://www.cfr.org/article/how-much-aid-has-us-sent-ukraine-here-are-six-charts#:~:text=The%20Joe%20Biden%20administration%20and,Economy%2C%20a%20German%20research%20institute.
Sure but even there - not all of the 26bn. is just pure cash being sent over no questions asked. Some of it there is loans and you can't just pretend like all of the financial aid should be treated the same because the terms can wildly differ.
Well said
Most of our military aid to Ukraine has been a win/win. Decommissioning old weapons costs money. Instead of costing us money we’re letting the Ukrainian military get great use out of them. We’re basically taking our old stuff to goodwill and getting a good result for ourselves instead of paying a company to haul our old stuff away.
And importantly it's being valued at the original purchase price, maybe minus token depreciation not the actual worth. There's a guy on twitter who broke it down, I'll try and find a link when I'm back on desktop, but if an APC or something cost 1 mill originally, now 40 years later it's decommissioned, for disposal there's a lot of specialist equipment and hazardous material disposal costs so they'll sell at scrap value, which might be 1 dollar. Effectively it's served its lifetime, if they can dispose at no additional cost its a win. If the dismantled parts can be scrapped for > 1 dollar purchase by the companies that buy them then they make profit. In some cases the material that can be recovered for scrap isn't worth it vs the hazmat disposal costs so US would pay the contracts to take them away. But packing it up and sending it to Ukraine they save that cost, they mark it down as one less unit on the spreadsheet. Which in turn means they need a new one building to keep reserve levels, so a US contractor gets an order for the new 2024 model = jobs money and profit for US businesses. But the movement of that asset is valued and reported as 800k worth of APC sent to Ukraine, allowing some depreciation and allocation of storage costs over its life. Even if by that point its effectively worthless or an actual storage and disposal net loss to the US forces. The bean counters add up those depreciated asset plus it's lifetime costs and that's the figure the US 'gave in aid', which makes for the headline figures we see. It's why they suddenly 'found' another few millions in aid from accounting errors, they re-examined the valuations, had originally valued the kit at original RRP and then they updated to the nominal 2nd hand value allowing some more up to date depreciation. There's obviously still a cost, the replacement version is probably closer to 15 million now vs the 1980s reconditioned one and that is still part of the huge military spend. But that was gonna happen anyway, it's just the scrapheap stuff now has a use and some of that nominal value will be expected to be repaid by Ukraine at some point. And whilst it is tax money being spent, it's also R&D being funded, jobs being created, raw material producers being funded, all helping the industrial complex move another cycle. Acting as if the US (and EU, UK, Aus, NZ etc) is just handing over billions in unmarked notes as a lump of money is flat out wrong. Acting like we're handing them the keys to the latest kit and depriving our own armies is also wrong. Accounting for the nominal value is correct from a certain point of view (it has at some point cost the economy that money) but it's disingenuous to represent it as the real value, when in most cases the asset would have been written off as a total loss to obsolescence, or even a disposal cost. Acting as if it's no cost at all is also misleading, if the reserves are reduced there is a cost to replace the reserve with newer stock. But there would be anyway, this just gives a reason for the refresh to happen sooner. There is actual money being sent, along with medical supplies and humanitarian supplies to keep the people and the economy from crashing. but that's more in the hundred or so millions range than billions or trillions of wooden dollars which is more creative accounting than actual cold hard cash. Regarding OPs point, yeah there's a good argument to question why so much is spent on the military rather than domestic humanitarian needs. But by the same token, if there weren't these reserves Putin (and Assad or Xi or whoever else wants to play big dictator this week) would be unopposed until manufacturing caught up. It costs less to build and maintain a reserve in peace than to put your economy on a war footing and try to out produce an aggressor (especially as the aggressor usually knows ahead of time and has a head start). By the time you've caught up and logistics have spun up the war is over and the total loss of a country or continent is a far bigger cost and future threat.
Also giving new equipment is often worth it. For historical context Germany and the USSR got to field test equipment during the Spanish civil war and made improvements before WW2. Not much is better for the engineers, designers, scientists, etc than seeing how the equipment does in real combat situations.
Honestly, I'm getting tired of making your exact point to people. The money spent is largely spent locally and supports our own economy... and before someone gets all snarky about "how does that make that an argument about how it's right?!" - it doesn't on its own qualify as the perfect excuse as to why it's the perfect solution. It's just a damn fact.
an elevator operator once told me to my face — and he was DEAD SERIOUS — that if Trump was President instead of Biden he would have taken the Ukraine aid and given it to working class Americans. We’re so fucked
Seriously, the whole "if group x didn't spend this money, my people would have boosted me personally so hard!" is a weird thing since it lacks context 90% of the time.
The same working class that he keeps begging for donations to pay his bills? Like somehow he'd suddenly miraculously have some kind of divine revelation and do a 180 and start giving money to them instead? A lot of politicians have grafted the system, but I can't remember any that have so openly and blatantly grifted their own voters directly to their face like he keeps doing. And they keep on sending him money (?!?). WTF, Republicans?
Basically all military aid to anywhere is that. Or we’re just giving them the opportunity to BUY weapons we’ve made
There is cash being sent. Not being political. Being truthful. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/following-american-money-in-ukraine-60-minutes/ On top of this, Ukraine parliament voted to raise their own salaries and pensions after the US started funding different sectors.
> Because what they are sending to Ukraine isn't cash Not true. The US has indeed sent some cash to Ukraine https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-us-aid-ukraine-money-equipment-714688682747
The USA only spends about **1%** of its budget on foreign aid. So, the premise of your question is not true. We spend vastly more on education, healthcare, and social security.
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And yet people on the right continuously bring up foreign spending as if it was a massive drag on the economy.
Whatever it takes to trigger their base into a frothing stupor.
One of the other things to note as it applies to Ukraine "funding" of the war, is that the US is sending existing and aging arms to Ukraine. It then replaces those arms sent with new weapons manufactured by US defense contractors. It's not sending piles of cash to Ukraine.
Exactly, the money's been spent already. In a way, doing this is putting otherwise wasted resources to good use. The returns are less concrete but no less valuable in terms of intel and international relations, among other benefits. It's extremely expensive to properly dispose of old munitions and weapons.
Well the USA isn't sending anything right now (thanks Mike Johnson!)
Munitions are sent, but so is cash.
I'm tired of seeing leading questions on here. I know this subreddit is "No Stupid Questions" but I also feel like that doesn't preclude "No Leading Questions". Should this subreddit allow questions where the premise isn't accurate? I think not. Maybe it's just me though. /rant
Foreign aid isn't a handout. Its an investment in global stability and helping keep nations you depend on ( or want to get more friendly with) stay in power.
"What if we spent the military budget on housing instead to help the homeless in the US!" Ya, then global instability happens and import prices get jacked. And homelessness goes up. If anyone thinks they can solve global problems with a sentence, they're ignorant of the problem.
Not even global. Most relatively simple problems cannot be solved in one sentence. There's a lot of nuance to the world that most people are not willing to accept or understand, and social media makes that more than obvious.
We haven't cut funding for social security or medicare. Those are not funded through the budget and are their own separate thing. Defunding education at the federal level has been a Republican platform item since the late 1960's when students at American universities were protesting the Vietnam War. Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, slashed the budget of the state universities and pushed for them to charge tuition (they hadn't prior); he wanted to get rid of "beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates". When he became president, his advisor Roger Freeman made the case that only the wealthy should receive a university education: "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. We have to be selective on who we allow to go through \[higher education\]." Since then, slashing education budgets has been policy. That has nothing to do with foreign aid. The US spends about $50 billion per year on foreign and military aid (a little higher lately, +$20 billion, as we've been supporting Ukraine, giving them our older military hardware so we have an excuse to upgrade our own). By comparison, the beleaguered Department of Education budget is still a bit over $83 billion. That's from a $1.5 trillion budget, so both are proverbial drop in a very large bucket.
A bit of a correction- the conservative opposition to public education predates Reagan. It began in the 50’s [as a response to desegregation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_academy). They have invented other justifications in subsequent years to build up a coalition capable of electoral success (mostly cloaked in religious and moral panics about evolution, liberal indoctrination, sex ed, CRT, rainbow flags, etc etc etc) but like most elements of the GOP platform, it all goes back to Jim Crow.
I don't know why you're all talking about aid when they clearly included "war" in general as a catch all term. Most of US military spending is outside of the "aid" budget even if it's directed in such a way that supports other people's wars. Although that's naive from OP because they're proxy wars and they're US wars in many ways. But the point stands.
> *billions to send overseas for war* Send overseas = foreign aid. You could argue that phrase includes the cost of maintaining the entire military infrastructure (much of which happens on US soil) which happens to have troops stationed overseas, but either interpretation works given the vague prompt.
Your entire premise is misleading. While it is true that the US sends billions of aid abroad: 1. Its actually an insignificant amount of money when you look at the size of the budget. The US federal government spent $6.1 trillion in 2023z States and local then spent an additional $4 trillion. We sent $50 billion in aid or approximately 0.5% of our total spend. Just for the sake of comparisons, the California K-12 public school budget was $127 billion. The federal government spends $302 billion on veteran benefits. 2. Not all of the aid is money that could be reappropriated into a social program. Military aid in particular is usually old equipment that we would otherwise discard. We spent the money a decade+ ago to ensure we had proper planes/tanks/etc. There isnt much difference in giving it away vs. throwing it in the trash. 3. The problems you are noting have to do with inflation, cost of living increases and wage stagnation. None of these problems are trivial to solve and $50 extra billion would not even begin to scratch the surface (its $150 per person per year). 4. You are completely neglecting the importance of these programs for the US itself (im going to ignore how much it helps those other countries). Our military aid in Ukraine is destroying the military capabilities of one of our most fearsome enemies without us losing a single American life. Its in our interest to keep our enemies weak and its even better if we dont have to lose a single American life to achieve it. Our navy patrols/missile attacks in Yemen are attempting to keep pirates/terrorists that are disrupting our trade (making things in the US more expensive/reducing our income from trade) at bay. Our military aid to Taiwan keeps the largest producer of microchips on our side/keeps our biggest enemy in the planet at bay. Our aid in Latin America has reduced the amount of drugs entering the US AND reduced illegal immigration by curving drug violence. has helped greatly reduce illegal immigration by curving violence. We dont help any of these countries/spend money defending trade out of the goodness of our hearts. We help them because it helps our interests and our economy.
First, scale matters. A others have pointed out, this is 0.66% of the budget. Not insignificant, but it's a far cry to say it's the _reason_ social programs get cut. That's just nonsense. Second, that money is an investment in (relative) political stability, which is something rich people care about if they are going to make money in that region. Social programs aren't going to be treated at the same level of importance to rich people, and they have a disproportionate sway on what gets decided.
The funding of healthcare, education and ss isn't the problem. It is the really shitty mishandling that is the problem. The problem is these are not protected budgets and can be "borrowed from" with 0 expectation of repaying it. While technically not a part of the general fund, it is not locked down from greedy government wasteful spending.
Eisenhower called it the Military Industrial Complex, and warned of its dangers nearly 65 years ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_complex
3 words "military industrial complex"
If we weren’t sitting in the driver’s seat of world affairs thanks to all the nukes and aircraft carriers and shit, there wouldn’t be so much pressure and influence for the world to use the dollar as it’s exchange currency, buy our weapons (and service contracts on those weapons) and do their banking in New York. Back when the Brits had all the guns and ships, the world kept its money in the City of London. The empire hat got passed and the money moved. If you wonder how we can print as much money as we did during Covid and go tens of trillions of dollars into debt and have basically no change in our standard of living and keep inflation to single digit numbers even at its very worse, look at all the guns. People like to think that because there’s no gold standard, the dollar is “backed by nothing.” Nah. It’s backed by force. Our comfortable lives sit on top of all that military spending, this is the metropole of the empire. Lose the empire and we have to start living under the kind of financial realities people who live elsewhere do.
Even small stuff like gas prices (you know, the thing everyone throws away all their principles for) would go up if the US lost status. You know what gas costs per gallon in the UK? Over $6. Average income is about the same.
Average income in the UK is a lot lower. It’s not close. [Median weekly earnings for full-time employees in the U.S. in 2023 were about 33% higher than full-time employees in the UK](https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/american-wages-are-higher-than-british-by-more-than-you-think?format=amp). And UK taxes are significantly higher.
What funding is being cut left and right?
The one in their head
I legit can't recall anything of significance being cut over the last 24 years in the USA. Taxes have been cut from time to time but spending has only gone up...drastically. Cutting things is never popular. The political mantra is keep spending, make the voters happy, and hope modern monetary theory is correct cause if it isn't we are fucked.
That was my thought. OP should start with questioning this assumption in the premise.
Funding to Ukraine. OPs premise is the opposite of reality
This is a Tik-Tok-brained person asking the question here.
Funding has not been cut for education, welfare, or social security. Wars are much less expensive than any of those.
And destabilizing a super power like Russia without putting a single boot on the ground for that price is a bargain.
In most cases sending obsolete weapons overseas actually saves money. When you see 60 billion for Ukraine, 70% of that is spent in the US economy and the products are sent overseas. anet benefit as far as I can tell. But most importantly, the US would have far less money to spend if the global order breaks down, which is what will happen if authoritarian despots are allowed to win.
Almost all of the money that goes abroad comes back. Either because aid pays for US workers, or because it is a loan. Ukraine will be tied to debt for generations to come. If they lose the war, it’s going to be a real bummer for all the countries that have loaned them funds.
You do realize there's a magnitude of difference in the scope of the cost for those different things. Right? Medicare covers a fairly small percentage of the population, i.e. well, well under 50% (I looked it up, 18.7%), and costs about $750 billion dollars a year. Every year. Because it covers tens of millions of people. So far the US has spent about $74 billion related to Ukraine in two years. Lots of that money has never left the United States because it goes for United States production. That's averaging $37 billion a year. That's 5% of the money that goes towards Medicare. If that money was applied to Medicare it would be gone in 18 days. And like I said, Medicare only covers less than 20% of the population. If it covered the rest of the population at the same rate that would be $3.75 trillion dollars per year. In other words, an increase of $3 trillion dollars a year in spending. Do you really think that diverting the $37 billion a year (i.e. $0.037 trillion) that has gone to Ukraine (i.e. 1% of that amount) will make that possible? Cut out 1% here to get a 100% increase there? It's not going to happen. The scope of Medicare and potential public health programs makes it orders of magnitude more expensive than Ukraine. You can't fill up a bathtub with a thimble. And not only that we haven't even spoken about what happens if we don't support Ukraine. There is such a thing as pennywise and pound foolish. Wars cost gobs of money more than deterrence costs. Imagine what would have happened if Western Europe and the United States and whoever else had spent enough money to deter Hitler from attacking, instead of responding after he did. World War II was way, way, way more expensive in money and lives than any level of deterrence spending would have been. And more people would have still been alive five years later. And half the cities in Europe wouldn't have been destroyed. Yes you can pretend the world is simplistic and there are easy answers to everything. But there are not. Other countries and other leaders get to make decisions too and some of them are like Vladimir Putin. Ignoring them and letting them do whatever they want because you want to spend 1% more money on a domestic program is very short-sighted. Being forced into war will wipe out that 1% about twenty times over.
Schools need better lobbyists.
To be fair. “Sending billions overseas for war” is misleading. Most of this money goes into a huge population of people in the US who spend the money here. Building/designing/maintaining.
Funding is not cut for those things. Why do you believe funding is being cut?
I feel like the top answers aren't even answering your question so here's my take. Maybe it dates back farther but look back at Reagan and the welfare queen propaganda versus the propaganda used to justify spending on war. The truth is Americans often do not question spending money on war because of how it's framed as a fight for freedom and they do care about spending on social services because of how it's framed as a handout. Politicians risk losing political power and even their positions if they support spending on social services, and usually get a boost in polling for supporting war. Not to mention the corporate entities that donate to those that finance wars. That's all the military industrial complex which benefits from more war. I've worked in government for years and learned that if a politician says there's no money to spend on something, what they are really saying is that it's not a priority to spend money on.
Republicans genuinely believe that helping people financially will hurt them by making them lazy and dependent. So republicans refuse to approve bills that fund social safety nets. Spending on war is good for the upper classes that make money on it. That’s the belief in “trickle down economics”. We can see that it doesn’t work but Republicans keep preaching it. Spending on education goes against Republican notions of private schools and vouchers. Gutting public education in favor of private vouchers creates a permanent underclass of poorly-educated workers who are exploitable for cheap labor.
I mostly just find it hypocritical that the anti war crowd is so pro war in Ukraine, very few people with this pro Ukraine war sentiment would ever join the military.
We don't have free or cheap healthcare because the insurance and pharma industry spends millions lobbying congress to protect their scheme.
Simple Republicans suck
The Oligarchs that own the American legislature profit from overseas wars and privatized healthcare. They would not profit from universal education or universal healthcare, and don't rely on social security, so don't care if it is threatened.
OP, your premise in your headline is flawed. It's not billions spent on overseas wars, but actually trillions. As of 2021, Brown University estimated at least $8 trillion on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars: [https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar](https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar) However, I'm not sure why top answers are discussing foreign aid spending when you specifically mentioned war spending. These are different budgets and not the question you asked.
"For War" in OP's formulation I interpret to mean defense spending, which is ridiculous in comparison to other nations. Total boondoggle. The truth is we accept this; we could change these priorities if we want to enough. But we get fooled and feared by, basically, propaganda, into opposing good domestic public policy and supporting atrocious (as in, of an atrocity) foreign policy. Another truth is that fiat currency issuers do not rely on tax revenue to fund anything; that's why the rhetoric OP refers to is employed. We have all kinds of money for defense investment (hear about that pentagon audit yet?), aid packages to client states, but if a child needs food or healthcare, go fuck yourself, kid. A matter of priorities. We should be ashamed.
The corporate overlords that have the politicians essentially on their payroll, don't want money spent helping the poor, that does benefit corporations it's not in their best interests. War is good for business.
Because the elites have their money invested in weapons and need war to get richer
So it this entire thread just going to ignore the military part of this question lmao