$100 Million a Day for Ukraine?

The junior senator from Kentucky wants Congress to provide oversight in respect of how the money is spent.

Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP
President Zelensky and Senator McConnell at Kyiv on Saturday, May 14, 2022. Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP

What a hubbub has erupted in the Senate over Rand Paul’s determination to bite the coin on $40 billion in military aid the solons want to dole out to Ukraine. The junior senator from Kentucky wants Congress to provide oversight in respect of how the money is spent. Given what a sink of corruption Ukraine has proven to be, that strikes us as not unreasonable. Then again, too, where is the Senate going to get the money?

Are President Biden and Senator Schumer going to put through a Ukraine War Tax? Or sell Yosemite National Park? Or cut back education spending? Or pull our GIs out of Free Korea? Or borrow more money from the Communist Chinese? Or is the Federal Reserve going to confect on computers more of its irredeemable fiat money that the new economic theorists keep saying we can keep creating without dolorous effect.

One doesn’t have to buy into all of President Trump’s or Tucker Carlson’s agenda to ask those questions. For it’s just no small thing to be on the hook in Ukraine for $40 billion at a pop — and in a two-front war. On one front, we are facing the Russkies. On the other front, we are facing the highest inflation rates in 40 years. If we learned anything in Vietnam, it ought to be  the danger of failing to make a choice between guns and butter.

We understand that $40 billion dollars is less than a third of one percent of our GDP. Plus, the dollar itself is nothing to write home about. Wall Street is agog that it’s holding up so well against foreign scrip. Since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, though, the greenback has shed more than 98% of its value in gold. Yet the richest man in the world is having trouble ponying up $44 billion for Twitter. Turns out $40 billion is still a stack.

The proposed outlays that have Senator Paul on guard cleared the House on Tuesday. The package was, as National Public Radio put it, nearly “nearly $7 billion more than what President Biden formally requested to supplement the roughly $13.6 billion Congress had already approved for the war in March.” It quotes “experts” as suggesting that for “a range of help” the pace of spending the money will be “roughly $100 million per day.”

This we mention because the Congress does a dandy job at getting us into war. It took us into Vietnam on a vote of 88 to two in the Senate. After the Democrats turned tail, the two senators who’d demurred — Wayne Morse of Oregon,  and Ernest Gruening of Alaska — came to be regarded by the left as prophets. In respect of Iraq, Senator John Kerry will be remembered for his boast: “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”

In the case of Ukraine, Americans have yet to hear from any of their leaders what might be called a proper speech on war aims. It strikes us that on a commitment of this scale, in a theater that has given us two world wars, and at a time when our country is so divided politically, a speech laying out where President Biden and the bipartisan leadership on the Hill are heading would be a priority all around. Particularly given the debacles in our recent wars. 

In the Battle of Vietnam, the Battle of Iraq — and, even more ignominiously, Afghanistan — we abandoned longtime allies whom we’d once beckoned to war. We ourselves have never thrown over our neoconservative instincts. Experience, though, has made us of a mind to confront in advance in any new war the choices that will need to be made once we commit our treasure or troops. So in our view, Senator Paul deserves some answers.  


The New York Sun

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