Only in a highly technical sense. Because this is the broken window fallacy [1].
Yes, most of the money is being "spent" in the US to hire workers to build new weapons and tanks and so forth.
But then all those resulting weapons and tanks are being sent to Ukraine. They're not staying in the USA.
And all those extra workers that have been hired? Well, they came from working on other things. Things that aren't getting done anymore -- or the people that replaced some of them came from yet other things that now aren't getting done, that aren't benefiting people and businesses in the US.
So no, there's no reasonable sense in which the money is "staying in the USA", in the sense of having our cake and eating it too. It's being spent on hardware that is sent to Ukraine. And we are losing out on all of the products and services that we would have built instead. All of that value is gone. Because it got shipped to Ukraine instead.
(I'm very much in support of Ukraine BTW. Not arguing against this at all! But we should be honest about what it costs us. We don't magically get most of the money back as a nation somehow.)
> But then all those resulting weapons and tanks are being sent to Ukraine. They're not staying in the USA.
I'm not sure why the end product of economic activity has to physically stay in the country to be beneficial. In the case of Ukraine, the US government spending money to build say anti-tank missiles and stockpiling them locally is arguably much less beneficial to the US than spending money to build anti-tank missiles and giving them to Ukrainians to use to blow up Russian tanks. Nobody is mounting a tank invasion of the US, but spending money to wreck one of the two major US adversaries is a pretty good return on investment in my book.
You're right that spending money on war in general is a great example of the broken window fallacy, but that has nothing to do with where the tanks you're building end up. It would be the same economic problem if it was a war being fought in the US or with the US as a direct participant. Everybody would have been better off economically if the Russians had stayed in their own country, but they didn't.
No, this is not the broken window fallacy for the US. It is the broken window fallacy for the entire global economy. Yeah obviously the war does not help the global economy.
The fact that the goods are exported is not relevant. Many goods are exported. Missiles, sure, but also food. Is exporting food a broken window fallacy? Obviously not.
The US has an immense economic competitive advantage in military goods owing to its technology. It’s a product like any other and the wages that flow through this industry as well as its suppliers are huge net positives to the overall economy.
Selling that which you have a competitive advantage on and buying the rest is the basic principle behind international economics.
It is clear that our 155mm production sucks and that 155mm shells are needed in large numbers in a peer contest.
Building 155mm capacity is itself beneficial, in that we are learning how to build more production lines and learn how to ramp.
No amount of money is 'useful' per se. What we care about the skills of our workers to reliably and consistently perform in these production lines.
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We get the best of both worlds. We can practice and ramp up production, building the production skills. But it's the Ukrainians who are putting their lives on the line. A bit grim, but this is very beneficial to us.
>And all those extra workers that have been hired? Well, they came from working on other things. Things that aren't getting done anymore
How can you be so sure? What if they came out of schools into their first job? Now those people get training, and some skills in their resume for the future.
Honestly, your entire comment reads very FUDy and lacking in proof/substance.
It's by definition. They would have gone to another job instead, where they would have gotten similar training and skills, on average.
Arms production isn't hiring a ton of people who would be unemployed otherwise. US unemployment is at around a historic low. Every extra job added there is basically being taken away from somewhere else. That's just how the economy works.
And yet, part of the reason unemployment is at historic lows--and more importantly the labor participation rate is so high--is because we are doing this.
Wrong. Again, this is just basic economic principles.
And no, current unemployment rates are not due to any kind of policy like this. We are not in the middle of a massive Keynesian stimulus. To the contrary, interest rates are high to try to slow things down.
> You're making it sound like they got roped into slavery against their will.
Of course I'm not. It's great for them. But it still means there's another job left unfilled. If they're making weapons, something else is not getting made/done. That's all I'm saying. Hope it's clear now.
> But it still means there's another job left unfilled.
Then it's their fault for being less competitive employers than those other military jobs. Welcome to the free market.
You are not owed employees just because you have a job opening, you need to compete for them. If you're an unattractive employer, tough shit mate. Git gud.
If you spend 1 billion on salaries then you can put compete someone else for labor. The trick to understand is it isn’t companies paying 50$/hour jobs being unable to find anyone because some company is paying 51$/hour. Instead companies paying ~15$/hour who can’t entice anyone because a long chain of people ended up with slightly better paying jobs because better candidates went elsewhere. Or at least it ends up that way long term, new factories can suck up all the local welders/etc temporarily, but then people learn those in demand skills or move etc.
Yes, and that's a feature not a bug, that's how we have record low unemployment. Because money is being spent on production, and not hoarded away for rainy days or in assets.
I've been feeling this way for a while. So much human effort spent on producing human suffering and death. No wonder everyone feels like everything is falling apart.
> And all those extra workers that have been hired? Well, they came from working on other things. Things that aren't getting done anymore -- or the people that replaced some of them came from yet other things that now aren't getting done, that aren't benefiting people and businesses in the US.
This effect is so negligible it’s not even worth calling out.
No, that's the entire point of the broken windows fallacy. It's not negligible -- it adds up to the same amount of value.
This is why it's called a fallacy, because people think it's negligible, when it's not. The Wikipedia article I linked to in my original comment explains it in full detail.
The broken window fallacy is due to things getting destroyed netting out the value being produced.
Nothing in the US is getting destroyed. The broken window fallacy does not apply unless you consider Russian and Ukrainian losses to matter to the US economy.
Your article has a little blurb about opportunity costs at the end of having soldiers at all but it’s really a different concept
We are having our cake (pumping cash into our defense industry) and eating it to (replenishing aging arsenals, advertising to prospective arm buyers, get invaluable real-world data on how our weapons work, decimating the military of a chief geopolitical rival).
There is no downside here form the US perspective. Every dollar spent is returned in ways that no other expenditure could replicate.
If you're talking about pumping cash into our defense industry, the whole point is that's taking production away from elsewhere. Defense is getting bigger, something else is getting smaller in the short term.
Sure, the whole thing has some some ancillary benefits, like getting real-world data, or "advertising to prospective arms buyers", but those benefits don't make up anywhere near what we're spending. If we only wanted those benefits, we would get them far cheaper by themselves.
So no, there are absolutely downsides. This is the very broken glass fallacy that I referred to. I'll repeat the final paragraph of the original for you to read -- you may want to read the whole Wikipedia article though:
> It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.
Again -- I totally support what we're doing, for the record. But money doesn't come free. We shouldn't pretend like this is all almost for free or something. It's not.
The real nuance of the broken window fallacy is that it's about the lack of economic benefit of a window being broken, not the most economically beneficial decision to make once it is.
Clearly you're better off if you have an intact window and you can spend your six francs on something you don't already have. But once your window is broken, replacing it is an equally viable economic decision compared with other uses of your six francs. The window breaking represents an economic loss, but replacing it might actually be the most economically advantageous decision of the ones available ("I wish it wasn't broken" not being an actual option).
In the case of the Russia invasion of Ukraine, Russia already broke the metaphorical window by throwing a giant rock through it. So now the relevant economic benefits discussion of sending weapons to Ukraine to use to shoot Russians vs buying everyone in America a pony should be framed (hah) post broken window, not from some hypothetical perspective where keeping an intact window is an option.
I totally agree there are economic downsides, nobody should be arguing they don't exist. But I think it's important to make it clear the economic downsides are from Russia starting the war. Once they did so, I think it is reasonable to argue our best economic response is to help Ukraine defend themselves.
Wouldn't it be cheaper just to print the money and give it to people directly without having to engage in all the waste required to start a war to require the bombs to require the employees to give them money?
Because the entire economic system is too complex for humans to micro-manage without negative downstream effects? I recommend some Hayek if you find this idea implausible.
There are probably some economic downsides, but it’s far, far less than what you’d see based on looking at the raw spending.
If most of the money is going to modernise the US military while freeing up old stock to send to Ukraine, that’s arguably money that would eventually have to have been spent anyway.
Windows do need to be replaced eventually. If you’re replacing an unbroken window a few years before it would’ve been strictly necessary, the cost associated with that early replacement isn’t very high.
Considering how attractive US military exports are becoming, I’m not convinced that the spending is a net negative for the US economy in the long term.
> Again -- I totally support what we're doing, for the record. But money doesn't come free. We shouldn't pretend like this is all almost for free or something. It's not.
This arms production isn't adding to economic growth to increase the size of the pie -- it's merely shifting it. Because its outputs are being sent abroad and not in a way that increases the economic efficiency of anything.
If this money were being invested in American business that built products and services sold to Americans, then it would be part of domestic economic growth and the pie would get bigger. But it's not. It's just shifting money instead. The pie size is fixed here.
Agreed, completely. This is all upside for us. We get rid of our outdated weapons, refresh our defense production base, support an ally, defend Europe, and stick a finger in the eye of a rival who tried to mess with our elections. We come out of this stronger and more popular with the countries that matter. Because Ukraine has greatly exceeded expectations, China also gets a lesson about how we back our allies.
Is this great to support allies, defend Europe, send a message to China? Of course. These are all great things.
But the point is, it costs the amount of money we're spending. The article is arguing that the money somehow comes back to America. It doesn't. It's not free. All of that production capacity is going to arms manufacture, instead of the economically productive things it would have gone to otherwise. It's not "all upside". It costs something.
Doing nothing also costs something, which you have repeatedly neglected.
If I had a time machine, I'd tell the British, French and Americans to assist the Czechoslovaks against the Germans instead of strongarming them into capitulation. It would have saved millions of lives and trillions of dollars. Many historials believe that without the boost from absorbing the Czechoslovak military, it would not have been possible to blitzkreig across France and the rest of Europe.
How are you missing me saying that I support this...? I've said it twice already.
But it costs money. That's the point here. The same as assisting the Czechoslovaks, in your example, would have cost money.
The article is trying to make it sound like the money comes back to us, and therefore it's free or something like that. It's not. I'm certainly hoping it's a good long-term geopolitical investment, but it's not free money.
The history of the US defense stockpile post WWII is relevant here .. if new things aren't regularly built the skills pipeline withers, knowledge is lost, old weapons 'rot' as explosives become unstable and the last person that built those particular FPGA target aquisition and guidance cards retires.
For better or worse the US defence industry operates by pushing tanks and shells out of it's back end while building fresh goods to stack on the shelves, all the while employing a good number of US citizens and indirectly pumping money into early tech education.
The question here is if not Ukraine (for the "old stuff") then where?
A much bigger question goes to whether such a bemonth of a weapons R&D | production industry that occupies such a large percentage of the US economy should be scaled back by a factor of five (and still be larger than any other countries).
Get back to be when you perfect your crystal ball and can let us know what the actual cost of doing nothing is, instead of just arguing about some theoretical savings.
Those things have some value, but in the long run war is almost entirely waste. The value you gain is greatly outweighed by the value of what you have lost. We are not losing many lives, but we are losing the opportunity to build things that would profit us (or the Ukrainians!) more. Every tank could have been a locomotive, or turbine in a power plant, or a couple of semis, or hundreds of washing machines. Why do you think the Russian soldiers were so happy to steal washing machines from bombed-out Ukranian cities?
That’s true, but in no way contradicts what I said. Even a necessary war is a waste. To think that the spending on war material boosts the economy in any way is purely to repeat the broken window fallacy. Yes, once the glazier’s son starts breaking windows you will be forced to put a stop to it, and that may require violence. The cost of arresting the glazier’s son, holding a trial, and imprisoning him is rather smaller than the cost of a war, but it is a cost all the same. You only willingly pay that cost when the alternative is to have another window broken every night for the rest of your life. Likewise, we believe that the cost of the war in Ukraine will be less than the cost of Russia’s future aggression should they win in Ukraine, so we willingly pay the cost of the war.
Because Russia started the war, we are now faced with paying the cost of winning it or of paying the cost of losing it. We choose to pay the one that we think will be less, _but it is still a cost we were forced to pay by someone else_. It is a net harm to us either way! (Not to mention the harm to Ukraine!)
We shouldn’t be glad that we gave Ukraine money and they are spending it with defense companies based in the US. Even if we take some solace in that fact, all it does is shift the money around; it doesn’t grow our economy. Just because it could be worse does not mean it is a net benefit.
You really are wrong. There is a reason the broken window fallacy is one of the most famed concepts in economics.
> There is no downside here form the US perspective. Every dollar spent is returned in ways that no other expenditure could replicate.
Suppose we gave "American aid." Instead of giving military items to Ukraine, we pick the names of 10 millions of Americans out a hat, and buy them things. Only restriction is it has to be made in America.
This has all the same effects on the US economy as military aid to Ukraine. It pays the salaries of some people in the US. It uses some raw materials that we have to buy. It costs us in taxes. It diverts some labor to whatever we're buying for the American consumers, and away from all other industries (this can be inflationary).
But the difference is, at the end of the day, those 10 millions Americans have something they didn't have before. America is slightly richer than if we'd given stuff to Ukraine.
So the aid to Ukraine is more beneficial to the US than if we were giving Ukraine money to buy Chinese goods, but still less directly beneficial to the US than if we spent the money on ourselves.
P.S. Like the grandparent post, I'm not bothered by this. I think it's appropriate to aid Ukraine, but it has a real cost to the US. I'm just bothered by the fact that you're so loudly getting the economics wrong.
Yes, but the winners of your lottery won't get missiles and tanks. I hope not, at least.
The US want a strong army, a debatable policy, but that's how it is. A strong army needs to be maintained, otherwise, well, look at Russia. And this is done by keeping people active, both soldiers and suppliers. If instead of building weapons, they decided to give random Americans what they want, like cars, computers, houses, whatever, sure, there will be some happier Americans, but also a weaker army, that may not be fit for the what they may be needed for in the future.
If you want to argue "this costs the US money, but it's worth the cost, because it has a benefit to our preparedness", that's one thing.
But from the article:
> This makes it “a misnomer” to call the $68 billion he calculates we have spent to arm Ukraine “aid.”
I really think the article, and people commenting in this thread, are blurring the lines between idea "this might be good for US military preparedness" (arguably true) with "this is a free lunch because it's paying american workers" (just false).
To summarize my position as unambiguously as possible: there may be second-order benefits, but aid to Ukraine is an economic cost to the US, not a free lunch. If you want to argue for non-economic benefits, I'm not saying anything in this thread that contradicts you.
I think you and OP are being pedantic by not considering the invaluable data, intelligence, and geopolitical impacts, all of which play an indisputable role in fueling the American economy and keeping that economy central to the global economy in and a rule-making position. A dollar spent on defense gets a bigger return than virtually any place you could take that dollar from, and some of the gains form that dollar are literally irreplaceable.
No, you're just having a totally different conversation.
I already said there are absolutely ancillary benefits. But that doesn't mean it's not costing money. It's costing a lot of money! The article is trying to make the point that the money is just coming back to the American economy and therefore, in a sense, isn't "costing" us. But that's false. We are spending real money.
Is the money worth it to affect the war effort? Of course. But it's real money being spent. It's not "coming back to us".
As I've restated several different ways, the economic gains from arms transfers are very likely to be a net gain for the US economy. It may not show up neatly on a P+L statement, but the magnitude of the potential gains vastly outweighs any trade-offs.
Ukraine was a growing trade partner with a trade balance that benefited the US and all those numbers go to 0 and stay there if it become a Russian puppet state. That's just one of many examples of how these arms transfers can provide a real, material gain to the US economy, which, as I have stated, cannot be replicated by spending money in any other way. It's not some fluffy "ancillary" benefit.
2) how many would it be if we were not providing them with assistance? Do you think they're just going to roll over and capitulate if the US turns off the tap? They didn't do that in the first few days of the war when they had very little assistance and practically none of their allies believed they would last the week, why would that happen now?
>Meduza is a pro-western publication, blocked in Russia, and can in no way be called a tool of Russian propaganda.
That article doesn't make the claim that you claim it does. In fact it actually makes an opposite claim.
"Moreover, there was “no trust” from Ukrainian authorities that the Russian side would follow through."
Russia has betrayed their "deals" with Ukraine many many many times. Of course Ukrainian and "Western" authorities have no trust that Russia will uphold them "this time".
YOU cannot claim that Ukraine "continues to fight mostly because the West tells them to" while completely ignoring their actual opinions on the matter. You do not appear to have actually seeked out their opinions on this matter. And their opinions on the matter are clear:
60% of the Ukrainian population supports continuing to fight. That's slightly down from 70% a few months ago, but still pretty high. Around this time last year, it was around 90%. There is and was a strong desire to continue resisting. To claim that "the West makes them" is fucking farcical, and yes, Russian propaganda, for which you have provided no substantiation.
It's literally in their constitution not to hold an election during wartime! There are legal issues with doing so! Even disregarding the practical issues!
Stop pretending you have any idea what Ukrainians are thinking right now. You're obviously extrapolating from your own interpretation of headlines and not even bothering to look for a primary source or even reading the details of whatever sources you are reading - that is completely absurd.
>how many would it be if we were not providing them with assistance? Do you think they're just going to roll over and capitulate if the US turns off the tap?
Seems like it? What else would they do?
Just look at what's happening, they are going to end up losing anyway despite the amount of money that the West has been giving them.
War sucks. Yes, soldiers are tired. How does that article imply that they are "losing" relative to Russia? Do you think the Russians assaulting Avdiivka right now are having a great time? I'm pretty sure that's not the case.
>But then all those resulting weapons and tanks are being sent to Ukraine. They're not staying in the USA.
They don't need to stay in the USA. Most of those weapons systems are not even particularly relevant to the US' needs right now. Some are even literally expired, or near their expiration date.
The US has thousands of tanks and thousands of armored fighting vehicles stockpiled as well as thousands of MRAPs left over from various occupations in the Middle East. Not only do we not need more of them, but those weapons were designed, and built, primarily to counter a scenario in which Russia (/ USSR) invaded Europe. And that's now happening. They will be of very little use in the Pacific, and will be of no use whatsoever if they just sit in the desert for another 20 years.
So if you want to talk about opportunity costs, that should be part of the calculation.
> And all those extra workers that have been hired? Well, they came from working on other things. Things that aren't getting done anymore -- or the people that replaced some of them came from yet other things that now aren't getting done, that aren't benefiting people and businesses in the US.
Wrong. People, and jobs, are not 100% liquid. People doing manufacturing jobs can't immediately retrain to be software engineers. And I don't know if you've noticed, but there are a lot of people who worked in manufacturing struggling to get by in an economy that has globalized manufacturing out of the US.
You may have also heard that the US is now trying to get repatriate some of that critical manufacturing back to the US. Defense spending is a good way to keep those skills and supply chains viable.
> So no, there's no reasonable sense in which the money is "staying in the USA", in the sense of having our cake and eating it too. It's being spent on hardware that is sent to Ukraine. And we are losing out on all of the products and services that we would have built instead. All of that value is gone. Because it got shipped to Ukraine instead.
Since you're so interested in opportunity costs, how about we have a discussion about the opportunity costs of allowing Russia to successfully invade their neighbors? The political opportunity costs of failing to help a nation which we had strongarmed into giving up their nuclear weapons in the 1990s, and the subsequent risk of increased nuclear proliferation? The opportunity costs of dealing with the situation now rather than later, with more land and population at their disposal (1938 Czechoslovakia says hello)?
This is a rare occurrence of a scenario where it is in our interests to help Ukraine, while being the moral thing to do, while also being an insanely efficient use of resources comparatively speaking. Certainly far moreso than the 20 years spent in the middle east.
Especially in the tightly-controlled defense industry! One we get into these types of industries we have veered pretty damn far from free market economics.
> how about we have a discussion about the opportunity costs of allowing Russia to successfully invade their neighbors
And, to put it bluntly, every nation Russia seizes is another nation that won't trade openly with the US. Or buy its weapons.
That only partially diminishes the point. It has been in effect for the vast majority of the duration of the war and is obviously worth considering, instead of downvoting into oblivion without even offering a response.
If it was never used, how "in effect" was it really?
I also can't see any support for the assertion that this would've meant US ownership of bits of Ukraine. WWII's Lend-Lease was a legal fiction; the lended (at no cost) weapons, vehicles, etc. were expected to wind up expended/destroyed, not returned.
No, the big secret is that much of the money would have been spent anyway.
Sending a 20 year old artillery shell to Ukraine and replacing it with a new built artillery shell is money that would have been spent anyway.
The money to build any F-16 sent to Ukraine is money that has already been spent. Sending it to Ukraine removes maintenance spending for that F-16 off the books. And we would eventually spend money to replace that F-16.
Not all Ukraine aid money would have been spent anyway, but a large portion of it would have.
Is this even per se a bad thing? One if the big talking points with "sending money to Ukraine" is the level of corruption. But materiel are much easier to trace than cash or digital currency.
I mean, yeah, the military industrial complex and all that, but that issues exists in either case.
I think calling it a secret is just plain insulting to anyone the bothered to read the drivel. And one is left with the feeling the author has an unstated agenda that's he's too chicken shit to state openly.
Whoop de do. The US, Western and Eastern European countries are using their market economies to build weapons to send to Ukraine or replace stocks of weapons also sent to Ukraine. And they'll keep doing that until either Russia gives up or implodes. If the author hates that he should come out and say he wants Russia to annex Ukraine.
a. The irrational, misguided, nationalist, uninformed, gnat-like attention of the populist and religious nationalist parts of the Elephant party
b. The utopian, peaceniking of parts of the Donkey party who profess dialog and appeasement will stop Russian tanks or deactivate millions of landmines
The reality is that it's cheaper and more strategically useful for America if someone else draws Putin into a war of attrition, giving them another Afghanistan. Either Putin runs out of political capital, money, and/or bodies. The issue is Putin needs an offramp from the war, and preferably an offramp from power to retirement or self-imposed exile.
That is, if the equipment is actually being sent. We're getting what would've been replaced anyway and even then only scraps. Bradleys are being cut down and decommissioned as we speak instead of being sent here.
The whole policy is to bleed ruskieland as much as possible at the cost of hundreds of thousands of our military personnel and civilian lives (just Mariupol alone is likely above 100k of the population dead), and a broken shell of a country if we manage to somehow survive.
We are sending a lot. Biden would send more if he could, but the Republicans won't let him. You may also not appreciate that the US cannot leave itself unprepared for a conflict, or its capacity to support Taiwan and other allies. Or the difficulties in increasing the manufacture of munitions and other military supplies. It simply isn't easy to do.
You also may not realize the level of antipathy toward sending aid to Ukraine that exists here in the US, particularly by Republicans. People here seem to think that we are sending all this money to Ukraine, personally enriching Zelensky. A lot of this is Russian propaganda that has filtered into US conservative media, sometimes direct from RT.
For anyone's interested, as of Feb 23 2023 the total GDP spend of the US on supporting us (all expenses) is around 0.37%[0]. Arguably, far more damage to US and its economy was done through deep infiltration and billions of spend on destabilizing campaigns was done by ruskies. But, well, both the left and the right are too busy with self-inflicted inner turmoil and complete dismantling of Western values through what looks like a mass ritual of self-hate.
It is likely that current inadequate policy and political actions would be written into history books as cowardice precipitating a tragedy, because when the aid in the early stages of the war proved to be too good, the next tier of equipment required for southern counteroffensive was being constantly delayed, and blocked, giving ruskies a lot of time to make our south the most mined territory in the world, and when the equipment arrived, it was both too little and too late.
And now the support is being cut off entirely, with some EU countries (and UK!) left to patch the gaps where they can. On top of that, we are finding ourselves in what is effectively a blockade by our own neighbors through successful ruskie op done at crucial time of elections in Poland and openly pro-russian Hungarian govt.
Personally, I don't see much justice in the world in general, we shouldn't have given up nukes and I dream one day our government restarts the nuclear program because it is the only insurance policy left and I promise, everyone's taking notes. Say goodbye to nuclear non-proliferation, say hello to re-ignition of all frozen conflicts because sides realize that you can get away with anything as long as you have the military power, for the US and the West will do nothing but watch.
US doctrine is to be prepared to fight two major wars. Implicit in that doctrine is that Russia is one of those two major wars. Aiding Ukraine in taking Russia off the table is cheaper than doing it ourselves, so by doctrine keeping Ukraine from losing should reduce our defence spending, not increase it.
Yes, most of the money is being "spent" in the US to hire workers to build new weapons and tanks and so forth.
But then all those resulting weapons and tanks are being sent to Ukraine. They're not staying in the USA.
And all those extra workers that have been hired? Well, they came from working on other things. Things that aren't getting done anymore -- or the people that replaced some of them came from yet other things that now aren't getting done, that aren't benefiting people and businesses in the US.
So no, there's no reasonable sense in which the money is "staying in the USA", in the sense of having our cake and eating it too. It's being spent on hardware that is sent to Ukraine. And we are losing out on all of the products and services that we would have built instead. All of that value is gone. Because it got shipped to Ukraine instead.
(I'm very much in support of Ukraine BTW. Not arguing against this at all! But we should be honest about what it costs us. We don't magically get most of the money back as a nation somehow.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window?w...