What if the United States invested foreign-war spending at home?

I keep coming back to one question: what would happen if the United States invested even half of what it spends on foreign wars and military support into the welfare and economic security of people living here?

I am not talking about raising anyone’s taxes.

I am talking about changing where existing public money goes.

If future military expenditures were reduced and those same dollars were redirected toward food assistance, housing, healthcare, childcare, education, or other domestic programs, the reallocation itself would not require an additional tax increase. It would be a question of priorities within public spending.

The amounts involved are not insignificant.

Brown University’s Costs of War project estimated that the United States spent approximately $31.35 billion to $33.77 billion on military aid to Israel and related U.S. military operations in the Middle East between October 2023 and September 2025.

Half of the lower estimate is approximately $15.7 billion.

For perspective, $15.7 billion is enough money to provide approximately 2.6 million households with $500 every month for an entire year, before administrative costs.

That is not a proposal for a new $500 benefit, nor can money already spent simply be recovered. It is a comparison intended to demonstrate the scale of the choices being made with public money.^[1]

The conversation about welfare in the United States also bears very little resemblance to the caricature that dominates social media.

According to the USDA, 79% of SNAP households in fiscal year 2023 included a child, an elderly person, or a nonelderly person with a disability.

Twenty-eight percent of all SNAP households had earned income, and among SNAP households with children, 55% had earnings.

In other words, employment and public assistance are not mutually exclusive.

Someone can work and still be poor.

A person can work full time and still struggle with rent, childcare, food, transportation, insurance, and medical expenses. When wages fail to keep pace with essential expenses, employment does not automatically produce financial security.^[2]

This is where the rhetoric surrounding immigration becomes particularly contradictory.

We are repeatedly told that immigrants are taking American jobs while simultaneously being told that immigrants do not work and live entirely on welfare.

Both narratives cannot describe the same population in the simplistic way they are usually presented.

Immigration policy is complicated. Labor markets are complicated. Public-benefit eligibility is complicated. None of those subjects become more accurate by reducing millions of people to a slogan.

Undocumented immigrants, for example, are not eligible for federal SNAP benefits.

Mixed-status families create another source of confusion. An undocumented parent can have a child who is a United States citizen. If that eligible child receives SNAP, the benefit belongs to the eligible child. It does not mean the undocumented parent suddenly became eligible for federal SNAP.^[3]

At the same time, undocumented immigrants still pay taxes.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimated that undocumented immigrants paid approximately $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022.

That number alone does not answer every question about the fiscal effects of immigration, but it makes one thing very clear: the claim that undocumented immigrants simply contribute nothing in taxes is inaccurate.^[4]

The claim that immigrants are simply “stealing American jobs” is also much more complicated than the slogan suggests.

A major National Academies review of the economic effects of immigration found that the overall long-term effect of immigration on the wages of native-born workers was very small and found little evidence that immigration significantly affected overall native-born employment. The research did identify groups that can experience greater labor-market competition, including some previous immigrants and some workers without high school diplomas.

That distinction matters.

There is an enormous difference between acknowledging that immigration can create competition within particular labor markets and claiming that immigrants as a population are responsible for Americans’ economic insecurity.^[5]

The same oversimplification appears in conversations about tariffs.

“Just buy American” sounds wonderful until you examine how modern manufacturing actually works.

The United States absolutely has domestic manufacturing. What we do not have is a completely domestic supply chain capable of instantly replacing everything Americans currently import.

A product can be designed in America.

It can be assembled in America.

It can be sold by an American company.

Its components, raw materials, electronics, machinery, packaging, or intermediate goods may still come from other countries.

The Federal Trade Commission specifically distinguishes between products that are merely assembled in the United States and products that qualify for an unqualified “Made in USA” claim. For the latter, the product must be made entirely or virtually entirely in the United States.^[6]

Tariffs do not magically create the factories, workers, machinery, mines, processing facilities, suppliers, and transportation networks required to replace an international supply chain.

The U.S. International Trade Commission examined tariffs imposed between 2018 and 2021 and found that American importers bore nearly the full cost of the tariffs it studied.

There were benefits for some protected domestic industries. Domestic steel and aluminum production increased.

But manufacturers that needed those metals as inputs faced higher costs, and production in some downstream industries declined.

That is the part of the tariff conversation that disappears when international trade is reduced to “foreign product bad, American product good.”

If we want more American manufacturing, then invest in American manufacturing.

Build factories.

Train workers.

Develop domestic suppliers.

Invest in infrastructure.

Create the capacity to manufacture the components we currently import.

A tariff can change the price of an imported product. It cannot manufacture a domestic alternative into existence overnight.^[7]

And this brings me back to foreign spending.

Israel has a national health insurance system that provides qualifying residents with a legally defined package of healthcare services financed through health insurance contributions and government funding.

American military assistance is separate from Israel’s domestic healthcare financing.

That distinction matters.

But so does the larger question.

Why is the United States willing to devote enormous public resources to supporting a foreign ally while Americans are repeatedly told that providing greater economic security, healthcare, housing assistance, food assistance, childcare, and education at home is financially unrealistic?

I do not resent another country’s population for having healthcare.

I question why Americans have been conditioned to regard comparable economic security for ourselves as unreasonable.^[8]

The same contradiction appears when we talk about education.

The OECD’s 2023 Survey of Adult Skills found that 28% of American adults between ages 16 and 65 performed at Level 1 or below in literacy.

That does NOT mean 28% of Americans cannot read. It means more than a quarter of the adults measured demonstrated very low literacy proficiency on the assessment.

That should concern a country that constantly describes itself as the wealthiest, freest, and most advanced nation in the world.

National pride should not require pretending our problems do not exist.

It should require believing our country is capable of solving them.^[9]

The Constitution should not become optional when immigration is involved either.

Immigration laws can be enforced while constitutional limitations on government power are respected.

In January 2026, a federal district court in Garrison G. v. Bondi found that ICE violated the Fourth Amendment when agents forcibly entered a man’s home without consent or a judicial warrant.^[10]

That ruling concerned the facts of that particular case, and constitutional law recognizes circumstances in which warrantless government action can be lawful.

But immigration enforcement does not erase the Fourth Amendment.^[11]

If constitutional rights only matter when the person exercising them is popular, they are no longer meaningful constitutional rights.

And perhaps the strangest part of this entire debate is how easily displaced people become the target of anger rather than the policies and circumstances that caused the displacement.

People generally do not abandon their homes, communities, languages, careers, possessions, and extended families because it was convenient.

War displaces people.

Political instability displaces people.

Persecution displaces people.

Economic collapse displaces people.

Violence displaces people.

Climate disasters displace people.

And American foreign policy has, at different points in history, played a role in some of the conditions that produce displacement.

Brown University’s Costs of War project has documented mass displacement associated with recent conflicts in Gaza, Israel, Lebanon, Iran, and the West Bank.^[12]

So I find it difficult to understand why so much economic frustration is directed downward.

The immigrant working beside you did not write the federal budget.

The mother receiving SNAP did not determine your salary.

The homeless person sleeping outside did not set your rent.

The refugee did not negotiate our military contracts.

The child receiving food assistance did not move your job overseas.

And the American consumer standing in a store trying to stretch a paycheck did not create a globalized supply chain.

Those are consequences of much larger political and economic systems.

Immigration policy deserves serious debate.

Trade policy deserves serious debate.

Military spending deserves serious debate.

Welfare programs deserve oversight.

Government waste deserves scrutiny.

The national debt deserves attention.

None of those conversations require turning struggling groups of people against one another.

A country can enforce its borders and respect constitutional rights.

A country can encourage employment and acknowledge that some fully employed people remain poor.

A country can support domestic manufacturing while recognizing that rebuilding industrial capacity takes more than tariffs.

A country can maintain international alliances while questioning the amount and purpose of foreign military assistance.

A country can care about civilians suffering abroad while demanding that its own citizens have food, housing, healthcare, education, and economic opportunity.

Those positions are not contradictory.

The contradiction is telling ordinary Americans that there is never enough money to substantially improve their lives while treating enormous expenditures elsewhere as inevitable.

Maybe the most productive question is not which struggling group deserves less.

Maybe it is why people who have so little influence over federal spending are constantly being encouraged to blame one another for where the money goes.

Sources

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