How much of your tax dollars are going to Israel and Ukraine

Planet Money

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🗓️ 29 March 2024

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

There's been a lot of disagreement in Congress and in the country about whether the U.S. should continue to financially support the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

Some taxpayers don't think the U.S. should give Ukraine any money to fight off Russia's invasion. And some taxpayers have concerns about how they might be funding weapons that have been used to kill civilians in Gaza. And there are questions about how much individual taxpayers contribute to war efforts, generally.

So in this episode, we attempt to do the math: The average taxpayers' contribution to Israel and Ukraine. It's not so simple. But in attempting to do this math, we get this window into the role of our tax dollars on foreign assistance, and how the U.S. sells weapons to other countries.

For links to some of the reports we looked at to report this episode, check out the episode page on NPR.org.

This episode was hosted by Sarah Gonzalez and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. It was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler and edited by Jess Jiang. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Numbers that explain the economy. We love them at the indicator from planet money and on Fridays we discuss indicators in the news like job number spending the cost of food sometimes all three.
0:10.8	So my indicator is about why you might need to bring home more bacon to
0:14.7	afford your eggs. I'll be here all week. Wrap up your week and listen to the
0:19.2	indicator podcast from NPR. This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:25.0	There's been a lot of disagreement in Congress and in the country about how the U has and whether the US should continue to
0:35.2	financially support the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. And the objections to these
0:40.4	two wars were people who have them, are different.
0:43.4	For Ukraine, some taxpayers don't think the US should be giving any money to fight off
0:47.6	Russia's invasion.
0:48.9	For Gaza, some taxpayers have concerns about how they might be funding weapons that have been
0:54.0	used to kill civilians. They're saying that more than 30,000 people have been killed
0:58.7	that hundreds of thousands are facing starvation and they want to know how their tax dollars contribute to all of this.
1:07.4	And in general, they are questioning how the US spends taxpayer money on foreign military operations and war.
1:14.4	So that is what we're going to look at today.
1:17.0	Hello and welcome to Planet Money, I'm Sarah Gonzalez.
1:19.6	And I'm Alexi Horwitz-Gazzy.
1:21.1	Today on the show, we attempt to figure out the average U.S. taxpayers' role in funding
1:25.9	these wars. Now, obviously, these wars are about much, much more than the money that is going to them.
1:32.2	Yeah, these wars are much bigger than the money that is going to them.
1:32.8	Yeah, these words are much bigger than any accounting we could do.
1:36.7	We know that.
1:38.0	But in attempting to do this math, you do get this window
	...

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