This calendar year, we are on track to run a budget deficit of $2 trillion. We have to borrow money just to maintain the current standard of living. We will pay over $500 billion in debt servicing costs alone on our $32 trillion national debt. This is unsustainable.
When Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, was asked what is the biggest danger to our national security, he responded, "The National Debt."
Secondly - a lot of that aid is humanitarian, while the military chunk is going to supply the Ukrainians with surplus American weaponry.
That doesn't make it any less unsustainable. Ukraine was a poor country before the war. Its GDP per capita was $14,300, just $100 more than Cuba's. And we are not providing them with "surplus weaponry." We must replenish our war stocks, which is part of the money allocated to the war.
What benefit to the American people? - it’s preventing a wider war
Pure BS. Why didn't we react the same way in 2014 when Putin annexed Crimea and the separatist movement formed in the Donbas? No real sanctions against Russia and business went on as usual including the building of Nordstream 2. Biden actually lifted US sanctions against Nordstream 2, reversing the Trump policies.
Russia represents no conventional military threat to NATO. We have no treaty obligations to defend Ukraine. The same kinds of arguments were used to get us into Vietnam. Remember the Domino Theory? The EU and US dwarf Russia in terms of population and GDP. China is our real existential threat. Yet no reaction when it seized Tibet or took over Hong Kong in violation of the agreement in had with the UK.
We are provoking a wider war by providing more aid to Ukraine, including more sophisticated weaponry. The F-16s represent the latest escalation. Putin has drawn redlines around Crimea and the Donbas. He considers Crimea to be part of Russia and will defend its territoriality up to and including nuclear weapons.
it’s stopping Putin from getting the nerve to go further - imagine if Hitler had been stopped at Czechoslovakia in 1938
More BS. Putin doesn't have the capability to go further without risking total nuclear war if he attacks a NATO country. You are totally divorced from reality if you think that Russia with 142 million people and an aging, declining population will attack and occupy Europe.
- it’s sending a message to the rest of the world to not try military conquests
Dream on. War is ongoing all over the globe. The US doesn't have the wherewithal to get involved in these conflicts. If anything, the war in Ukraine will demonstrate the powerlessness of the US to get involved and change the outcome. We just left Afghanistan in defeat after 20 years of involvement and trillions of dollars.
The real question is how do we end the war in Ukraine, a war that Ukraine cannot win. Has it really been worth it, not only for us, but also, for Ukraine? Russia shares a 1,500 mile border with Ukraine, along with hundreds of years of cultural, linguistic, and historical ties. Zelensky estimates it will take $800 billion to rebuild the country. In the meantime 7 million Ukrainians are refugees in Europe, many of whom will never go home. And 10 million Ukrainians have been displace internally. A country and an economy in shambles run by corrupt oligarchs. Can the EU foot the bill for all of this? Why should Uncle Sap continue to pay the lion's share of the bill for this proxy war?