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Biden Looks to Fund U.S. and Ukrainian Governments in One Fell Swoop

President Joe Biden has asked congress for another $13.7 billion in aid for Ukraine as part of a short-term government funding bill.

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Photo by NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images

President Joe Biden has asked congress for another $13.7 billion in aid for Ukraine.

The additional $13.7 billion would be part of a short-term government funding bill, divided between $11.7 billion for military and economic assistance for Ukraine, and the other $2 billion to help offset the impact the war has had on the domestic energy market. The short-term funding bill must be passed by congress before the current fiscal year comes to a close Sept. 30 if the government hopes to avoid a shutdown, and would give Congress more time to ink a longer-term funding measure. The White House claimed its demands would ensure the current, break-neck pace of U.S. aid to Ukraine could continue for the first three months of fiscal year 2023.

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Of the $11.7 billion requested by the White House for Ukraine, $4.5 billion would be for new military equipment and to replenish the Pentagon’s stockpiles. Another $2.7 billion would be devoted to defense and intelligence aid for Ukraine, and the other $4.5 billion is to make sure the Ukrainian government doesn’t run out of money. Funding America's government is inseparable from funding Ukraine's government, it seems.

Three-quarters of the money to shore up the U.S. domestic energy market will be used to purchase uranium to fuel nuclear reactors. The other $500 million will be used to modernize the Strategic Petroleum Reserve—large, underground reservoirs capable of holding 727 million barrels of oil in total for times of crisis—which sounds like a lot, but isn’t considering the U.S. goes through about 20 million barrels per day.

Shortly after Congress approved the $40 billion aid spending package for Ukraine in May, the New York Times reported that America had already committed $54 billion to helping Ukraine outlast the Russian invasion. As the nation entered the long summer months, however, domestic issues like inflation, an energy crisis, and 2022 midterm’s primary season took center stage. Somewhere along the way, the corporate media stopped counting, and for those few who tried to keep pace, piecemeal aid packages from a variety of government sources made the money much harder to track. All the while, defense contractors were given their biggest break post-Afghanistan yet.

Pedro Gonzalez, a senior writer at Chronicles, has been one of the few to understand what the war in Ukraine has been since the beginning—yet another grift in the name of liberal imperialism—and of those few one to actually tabulate just how much the U.S. has spent in Ukraine since war broke out in February. 

Writing for IM—1776, Gonzalez said

A conservative estimate puts the total commitment by the U.S. to Ukraine since the outset of the war in February at around $60-65 billion… Uncle Sam has so far pledged significantly more money to this war than all European Union countries combined, according to data compiled by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. In June, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. spending on Ukraine hit roughly $130 million a day.

And given the boomer brain-rot that has kept the Republican Party trapped in the Reagan years, not to mention the liberal obsession with Democracy promotion, Washington’s support for Ukraine shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon—seemingly no matter how bad things get for Americans at home.

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