President Joe Biden participates in a bilateral meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine during the G7 Summit, Sunday, May 21, 2023, at the Grand Prince Hotel in Hiroshima, Japan. (Official White House Photo by Cameron Smith)
In an essay on his website, the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, Dr. Ron Paul, a former congressman and presidential candidate, explains that within the recently passed continuing resolution, there was one noticeable victory: the lack of funding for Ukraine’s war against Russia. Paul explains that the best place to cut America’s spending to rein in the national debt is defense spending. I agree with Ron’s premise that if Congress and Biden want to fund Ukraine, they should at least be forced to vote on it separately so Americans know who’s jacking up the bill on the grandkids. He concludes:
Unfortunately, the welfare-warfare spending coalition has once again triumphed over the small group of fiscal conservatives, as a continuing resolution that did not even pretend to cut spending passed in Congress over the weekend.
Fiscal conservatives and the growing wing of the GOP opposing foreign intervention did achieve one significant victory: The CR did not contain the Biden administration’s requested additional aid for Ukraine. The successful effort to strip Ukraine funding from the continuing resolution may threaten President Biden’s effort to obtain billions more in funding for Ukraine.
Since the start of the conflict, the US government has wasted more than 100 billion dollars in aid to Ukraine, which is close to Russia’s entire 2023 military budget! Not only does the Ukraine-Russia conflict have no impact on America’s national security, it could also have been avoided had the US not helped orchestrate a 2014 coup in Ukraine. The Ukraine conflict is thus another example of Ludwig von Mises’s observation that the unintended (or intended) consequences of government intervention are used to justify further government action.
Unless the US reverses course and begins to cut spending, the Federal Reserve will be forced to end its limited efforts to fight price inflation. Instead, the Fed will bow to political pressure to keep interest rates low in order to help government manage its ever-increasing debt. This will lead to both a rejection of the dollar’s world reserve currency status and a major economic crisis.
The best place to cut spending is the so-called “defense” budget that makes Americans less free and less safe. Hopefully the successful effort to strip Ukraine funding from the CR is the first of many victories by the antiwar fiscal conservatives over the military-industrial complex and its politicians, lobbyists, and propagandists.
Read more here.
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