March 04, 2024
The Washington Post had a news quiz that included the results of a survey showing how much money people thought we had given to Ukraine. What is striking is not just that people were wrong, but rather they were insanely wrong. (Post readers thankfully did considerably better than the people responding to the poll.)
The first question asked people how much aid we gave to Ukraine measured as a share of GDP. The correct number is around 0.5 percent of GDP, or $140 billion. (I haven’t tried to add it up carefully, so I am taking the Post at its word here.) According to the Post, 46 percent of people answered that we had spent close to 10 percent of GDP, which would come to $2.8 trillion. The piece reported that 23 percent answered that we spent an amount that was more than 20 percent of GDP, or $5.6 trillion.
The second number asked how Ukraine spending compared to Social Security spending. Forty two percent said we spend about the same on Ukraine as on Social Security and 28 percent said 18 times more. We spend roughly $1.4 trillion a year on Social Security, which means that over the last two years we have spent close to 20 times as much on Social Security as on Ukraine.
No one can expect the average person to know with any precision how much money the government is spending on Ukraine or anything else. People have jobs. They don’t have time to go digging through budget documents to figure out where the government’s money is going. But we might expect that they would be somewhere in the ballpark, maybe off by a factor of two or three, but not a factor of 20 or 40.
If people believe that we are spending twenty times as much on Ukraine as is actually the case, what does it mean when they say they are opposed to aiding Ukraine? Are they opposed to giving Ukraine the amount of money that is actually on the table or are they opposing giving an amount that is twenty times as large, which absolutely no one is proposing?
Part of this story is that the politicians opposed to aiding Ukraine have reason to lie about the money being spent. To advance their case they would like people to believe that the money going to Ukraine is preventing the government from spending money on popular domestic items. For this reason, they are happy to talk about Ukraine aid as though it is twenty or even forty times larger than is actually the case.
However, part of the blame for this extreme ignorance can be laid at the doorstep of the media. They routinely refer to spending amounts in the billions or tens of billions of dollars, sums that are meaningless to almost everyone who sees them.
It would be a very simple matter to refer to these numbers as shares of the budget. For example, the $60 billion proposal current on the table is equal to approximately 0.9 percent of this year’s budget. If the media routinely reported budget numbers in a way that provided some context, it is less likely that we would find that the vast majority of the public overstates spending on Ukraine or other items by an order of magnitude.
For what it’s worth, people in the media do recognize this problem. However, for some reason they refuse to do anything to address it. I will also add that there are entirely legitimate reasons that people may oppose aid to Ukraine, however being 10 percent of GDP is not one of them.
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