This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Tuesday, December 19th,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown.

Joe Biden has had a hard time detailing a coherent reason for American taxpayers to continue to

provide tens of billions of dollars for war in Ukraine.

Justin Logan details a few of the reasons why U.S. interests aren't well served by devoting billions more.

Can you give me a sense of just the status of the United States with respect to Ukraine

in terms of our financial or other material support of their

effort against Russia. So at this point we have committed over a hundred thirteen

billion dollars in aid to Ukraine, including military aid.

In other financial aid, some of the congressional Republicans, Senator Vance in particular,

has pointed out that the $113 billion figure does not include everything,

reprogramming of other funding, for example, so if anything, that's a lowball figure and the administration has a request pending

as we're speaking at present for another $61 billion in aid that is a real bone of contention on Capitol Hill at present.

So depending on whose accounting you're working from, it's approaching 200 billion if this

most recent request is granted.

So this has been over the same time period where

both public opinion on the necessity for U.S. involvement in this fight has declined,

and particularly among Republicans who have, even in Congress,

their support has waned outside of leadership of course.

Yeah, that's right. So I think you know the American people are very fickle in a

sense. It's easy to get Americans spun up about something, but they can lose attention quickly,

and particularly if a fight is seen not to be going terribly well.

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