Why provide healthcare when we can provide death and destruction instead!
The government actually has infinite money
Not that I'm saying we should throw money into these wars, but rather that we should have no issue taking care of healthcare and student debt.
Sort of. The US government has created the extraordinary privilege of dollar hegemony, which lets them issue money ad nauseum at the expense of the rest of the world. This privilege ends when the rest of the world stops underwriting this debt, as is slowly happening under the broad name of dedollarization.
"defense" industry lapdogs absolutely drooling at the steak Genocide Joe's dangling over their heads
While I'm openly in favor of supporting Ukraine, it's important to note that the vast majority of this type of military aid is provided in kind.
So really, it's a proposal to give US Defense contractors $100b+ to replenish and restock the DOD with new kit and munitions for the old kit and munitions that we're providing to Ukraine. Which then get into the use accounting tricks e.g. depreciation values, etc.
The annual military aid to Israel is a little different, it's more like a loss leader coupon: give Israel money that they have to spend with US Defense contractors, which then also incentivizes them spending their own budget on complementary systems that can be integrated with those systems, munitions, support contracts, etc.
Although in this case, I believe it's primarily munitions and other kit that the DOD already has in warehouses.
This is oversimplified, but I just see these headline figures always being confused for pallets of cash.
Yes, the correct nuanced take is pallets of cash to arms dealers and pallets of weapons to allies and puppets.
While I'm openly in favor of supporting Ukraine
How about Palestine?
If the Palestinians had received a quarter of what Ukraine has received in the last three years Israel would be no more. I certainly don't have a problem with that.
Do I support giving arms to Israel? No, but that wasn't the point of my post. It was an very high level explainer to head off the inevitable portrayal of this as a direct cash transfer.
Did you you seriously just describe your own comment as "very high level"?
Did you really confuse that for meaning "expert" and not "incredibly basic and way oversimplified"?
Remember when we used to make fun of parliamentary governments when they became “without a government.”
Well joke’s on us right now with a Speakerless House.
