>> Literally today ; talking about 'running out of money and raising the debt ceiling' - but zero acknowledgement of the ~250 BILLION dollars we have thus far sent to Ukraine
A lot of that money exists only on paper. Take a warehouse full of air defense missiles manufactured in 2000, with a cost of $3m per missile and a shelf life of 25 years. If you give 200 of them to Ukraine to defend its citizens from Russian terror attacks, then on paper that costs $600m. If you use "replacement value" as cost and new missiles cost $6m (because they're better), you can inflate their value to $1.2bn. If you do nothing and let them expire, they'll be worthless in 2 years and you'll just write that $600m or $1.2bn off. In either case, accounting reports lots of money spent, but no real money actually changes hands. That money was already spent decades ago and you aren't saving anything by withholding missiles. By giving air defense missiles to Ukraine instead of letting them sit in a warehouse until they become obsolete, you at least do something useful with them.
A lot of that money exists only on paper. Take a warehouse full of air defense missiles manufactured in 2000, with a cost of $3m per missile and a shelf life of 25 years. If you give 200 of them to Ukraine to defend its citizens from Russian terror attacks, then on paper that costs $600m. If you use "replacement value" as cost and new missiles cost $6m (because they're better), you can inflate their value to $1.2bn. If you do nothing and let them expire, they'll be worthless in 2 years and you'll just write that $600m or $1.2bn off. In either case, accounting reports lots of money spent, but no real money actually changes hands. That money was already spent decades ago and you aren't saving anything by withholding missiles. By giving air defense missiles to Ukraine instead of letting them sit in a warehouse until they become obsolete, you at least do something useful with them.