Of course we need to separate military costs from human interest costs like running a government when tax income is down or supporting refugees."
You raise some good points.
We can start with this: roughly half of US aid to Ukraine is military equipment, the rest is humanitarian and financial aid.
And my understanding is that virtually all of the military equipment and ammo sent to Ukraine came from old US stocks which were due for scrap anyway.
So, the actual $ amounts represent the cost of replacing our old stocks with all new stuff, with latest updates, not some kind of market value of the equipment shipped.
gleeaikin: "So how much of the $3 trillion mentioned in this comment are real expenses?
Specifically, how much of the circa $55 billion a year to Ukraine has been real?"
My figure of $3 trillion is the total US Federal deficit for the past two years -- $1.7 trillion in 2022 and $1.3 trillion in 2023.
I'm saying that most or all of that money was spent on insane Democrat vote-buying schemes, and we need only eliminate such nonsense to bring our budgets back into balance.
Total aid to Ukraine since February 2022 is said to be now $113 billion, of which not all has yet been delivered, so the average is roughly $55 billion per year.
Of that total, roughly half is hardward and the rest in humanitarian and financial aid.
gleeaikin: "If we have already paid for tanks and other major equipment in past budget cycles, then we should only have to count the cost of shipping this pre-existing equipment and training the recipients as new money."
My understanding is that virtually all of the money spent on hardware for Ukraine is actually going to replace our own obsoleted inventories with brand new state-of-the-art stuff.
Ukraine is getting our old stuff, and it's still good stuff, just not the best we have.
gleeaikin: "If we are regularly paying for storing and maintaining this equipment in the US, then when we send it elsewhere we should be subtracting these savings from somewhere.
This was made clear in the argument over cluster munitions.
They were approaching elimination date, and now they are in Ukraine and we no longer pay for storage.
Nor will we have to pay for deconstruction."
Right. Money's voted by Congress pay to replace those old stockpiles.
gleeaikin: "Since we also send equipment and other material foreign aid to Israel, South Korea and others, how much of our national debt is based on double billing, and how much is actually real.
Do we really have over $20 trillion in national debt, or should these figures actually be recalculated to reflect real conditions?"
Total US national debt today is approaching $33 trillion.
Of that, something like $8 trillion can be blamed on the 20-year long War on Terror, but all the rest, so far as I can tell, is simply insane Democrat vote-buying schemes, intended to keep them in political power, and so-far, highly successful at that.
So, there's no reason to doubt that our national debt is as reported, since it represents simply the excess of Federal spending over Federal revenues, there's nothing more complicate than that in it.
gleeaikin: "Are we actually paying interest on a huge national debt, or is some of this interest being misapplied? Are we paying interest on used military equipment given as foreign aid which was already paid for in a previous budget cycle?"
I'm saying: no, it's not about potential accounting gimmicks, it's very simply the same as your own checkbook or credit card account.
The debt is whatever we actually spend minus whatever revenues we actually received.
Nothing complicated there.
gleeaikin: "It seems that large chunks of money/debt have been moving around in our treasury in a number of different administrations.
This sounds like a topic for investigation that should concern us all, whether we are Republicans, Democrats, Independents, or some other organized/disorganized party.
Are we kept in a state of fear by faulty accounting methods misused by opposing political parties?
WHAT IS OUR TRUE NATIONAL DEBT???"
Those are great questions for Congress to submit to our Treasury Dept for clear and direct answers.
I noted very recently another news story saying the Pentagon has yet again failed an independent audit of its books.
My understanding is, the Pentagon has never, ever passed such an audit, in large part because of highly secret budgets for undisclosed projects.
And from time to time, we hear reports of the Pentagon "lost" $1 billion here or $6 billion there and supposedly nobody knows where it went.
But somebody knows, and maybe those are just accounting gimmicks catching up to final reconciliations.
Bottom line, my understand of the true values of all national committments over the revenues now available to pay them -- i.e., social security or medicare -- is not just $33 trillion, but several times that amount over the next decades.
All of it should be and must be addressed, once our Democrats are removed from national political power.