What Tucker Carlson won’t tell you about U.S. military aid to Israel
That aid doesn’t really come at the expense of spending on domestic issues
Conservative political commentator and podcast host Tucker Carlson speaks at Turning Point’s annual AmericaFest conference in Phoenix, Arizona on Dec. 18, 2025. Photo by Olivier Touron / AFP / Getty Images
Contributing Columnist Dany Bahar February 24, 2026
Tucker Carlson sat across from United States Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee at Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport and delivered a version of an argument that demagogues have recycled for centuries.
“Our country is not thriving,” Carlson said, “and we’re spending tens and tens of billions of dollars over time defending Israel.” His implication was clear: that same money could be spent fixing things at home. Why are we sending around $3.8 billion a year to a country with universal healthcare when many Americans can’t afford a dentist?
It’s a powerful line. But here’s the math Carlson doesn’t want you to do. The federal government spends roughly $7 trillion a year. We send more than $3.8 billion in annual military aid to Israel; that represents 0.054% of the budget. That’s approximately five cents out of every hundred dollars. The government spends the equivalent of the entire Israel aid package every five hours.
“Fine,” you might say, “but $3.8 billion is still a lot of money.” It is. But if that’s your standard, why single out this line item? After all, the government made $162 billion in improper payments last year — money sent to the wrong people, in the wrong amounts, by accident. That’s 42 times the annual aid to Israel.
If Carlson cared about fiscal responsibility, he’d be screaming about accidental overpayments, not a line item that rounds to zero. But he’s not. Because the money was never the point.
I say this not as a defender of any particular aid package. It’s legitimate for Americans to debate the merits of the U.S. sending military aid to Israel. I say this as an economist who has spent a career watching this exact rhetorical trick be deployed across the political spectrum, by politicians and pundits who know better.
What Carlson is doing is creating what’s known as a false dilemma: presenting two options as if they’re the only possibilities. Either we fund Israel’s military, or we fix our own pressing domestic problems. Pick one.
It sounds intuitive because it maps onto how households think. Each of us is used to making these daily calculations. If, say, I spend $100 going out to dinner, I can’t spend that money on groceries that would keep me fed for much longer.
But a government with a $7 trillion annual budget is not a household. We can easily conceive of how much money $100 is, and how far it will stretch. Almost none of us can readily do the same for $7 trillion.
That vast, vast sum funds thousands of programs simultaneously because it has to. Governments work in “stereo”: They have to fund defense, education, healthcare, foreign policy, disaster relief and food safety, all at once, all the time. And that’s just a fraction of the list.
The idea that we must choose between sending aid to an ally and fixing potholes in Ohio is designed to make you feel like someone is stealing from you. And it works.
Carlson knows that he’s deceiving his audience. He understands that cutting Israel aid to zero would not build a single hospital or hire a single teacher. Instead, it would most likely be redistributed within the State Department’s foreign operations budget, or shave a vanishingly miniscule amount off the huge and ever-growing U.S. budget deficit. Not exactly a game-changer for American healthcare.
He makes the argument anyway, because zero-sum thinking is one of the most powerful instincts in politics.
A recent study by some of my economics colleagues surveyed more than 20,000 Americans and found that people who see the world in zero-sum terms —where one group’s gain must come at another’s loss — are drawn to populist positions across the spectrum. On the left, they favor more economic redistribution; on the right, more immigration restrictions. The cognitive instinct is the same; only the target changes.
Both sides shamelessly overuse this tactic. Sen. Bernie Sanders, for instance, regularly plays it from the left — also, occasionally, regarding Israel. “We need health care for all Americans, not weapons for a war criminal,” he wrote on X this month, in response to a U.S. sale of arms to Israel.
Back in 2016, pro-Brexit campaigners plastered a red bus with the claim that Britain sent 350 million pounds a week to the European Union, money that should go to the National Health Service instead. The number was inflated, the trade-off was false, and Nigel Farage admitted as much the morning after the vote. But it worked: Vote Leave’s own campaign director later conceded that without the NHS claim, Remain would likely have won.
In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez built an entire movement on the premise that oil revenue spent on anything other than social programs was revenue stolen from the poor. He redirected billions from reinvestment in oil production toward social spending, starving the industry that drove the nation’s economy. When oil prices dropped, the productive economy collapsed. The social programs collapsed with it.
The honest version of Carlson’s argument — “I think military aid to Israel is not a good use of American resources, and here’s why” — could be a perfectly legitimate position. We can debate the strategic value of that aid and its humanitarian implications, as well as the proper allocation of the foreign aid budget. But by singling out this one-line item and building an entire narrative around it, Carlson is not making a fiscal argument. He’s constructing a villain. When your obsession with government overreach zeroes in on the half of a tenth of one percent of a $7 trillion budget that goes to Israel, the argument isn’t really about the budget anymore.
“Can you feel the resentment?” Carlson asked Huckabee. “Because it’s real.” He’s right that the resentment is real. Americans are frustrated about healthcare costs, stagnant wages and crumbling infrastructure. Those frustrations deserve serious engagement.
What they don’t deserve is to be exploited. The false dilemma of us or them is shameless manipulation driven by resentment — Carlson’s word — if not something far worse.
