2024-03-30
23 分钟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. Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
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There's been a lot of disagreement in Congress and in the country about how the US has and whether the US should continue to financially support the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
And the objections to these two wars for people who have them are different for Ukraine.
Some taxpayers don't think the US should be giving any money to fight off Russia's invasion for Gaza.
Some taxpayers have concerns about how they might be funding weapons that have been used to kill civilians.
They're saying that more than 30,000 people have been killed, that hundreds of thousands are facing starvation, and they want to know how their tax dollars contribute to all of this.
And in general, they are questioning how the US spends taxpayer money on foreign military operations and war.
So that is what we're going to look at today.
Hello, and welcome to Planet money.
I'm Sarah Gonzalez.
And I'm Alexi Horowitz.
Ghazi.
Today on the show, we attempt to figure out the average us taxpayers role in funding these wars.
Now, obviously, these wars are about much, much more than the money that is going to them.
Yeah, these wars are much bigger than any accounting we could do.