Commentary
The other day, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani told Qatari state media that the United States was “spending tens of billions of dollars on killing people” when that money “could have been used to make life easier” for the public.
“There always seems to be money for war,” he went on, “but not to feed the poor.”
The United States, in reality, spends immense amounts of money feeding and taking care of the poor—far more than it does on war.
Yet, if you listened to the left, you’d think that military spending was driving the debt and squeezing the poor. National defense makes up about 13 percent of the federal budget, far less than the primary drivers of debt, Social Security and Medicare.
We spend less on the military than we do paying down the interest on our immense $40 trillion national debt.
The federal government spends about $1.3 trillion each year on means-tested welfare and “anti-poverty” programs. That’s more than the national budget of Germany.
There are somewhere in the vicinity of 80 individual federal programs providing aid to the poor. More than 36 million people in the United States receive food stamps, for instance, which is about 11 percent of the population.
About 100 million Americans receive some form of government assistance. Virtually none of them pay federal individual income tax.
None of this accounts for local programs. More than 23 percent of an average state’s expenditures go to welfare, which is not only more than states spend on public schools, but also far more than they spend on police, hospitals, and roads combined.
Then there are city government programs. In Mamdani’s New York City, a record $2.71 billion in direct welfare cash assistance payments were sent out in 2025, a 70 percent spike from 2022. New York City also spent $14.63 billion on social programs for the poor. It spends less than half as much on the police.
A crude back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that the average family in New York City probably contributes more than $11,000 each year to government programs that help those living below the poverty line.
On the other hand, in the larger scheme of things, we spend little on “bombs.” In a typical fiscal year, baseline spending on munitions is about $30 billion. (Because of the Iran war, that number has spiked to $76 billion.)
Don’t get me wrong, as a raw number, that’s a lot. And no one can credibly argue that the Pentagon has been a good steward when it comes to military spending.
But in perspective, the $919 billion in federal and state funding of Medicaid last year was more than all the money we’ve spent on munitions for more than 15 years. The U.S. gross domestic product was more than $30 trillion in 2025. About 3 percent of it was spent on national defense.
Leftists love to point out that the United States devotes more money to its military than the next six highest-spending countries combined. It’s true. Being a hyperpower doesn’t come cheap. The United States also spends more on welfare and entitlement programs—cars, tech, housing, and virtually everything—than the next six countries combined.
If you believe that the state isn’t sufficiently assisting the poor, there are thousands of other ways to get involved. About 70 percent of Americans reportedly give to charity each year, amounting to an estimated $617 billion in 2025—more than the next six countries combined.
Of course, no amount will ever be enough for people who believe that all economic activity should be siphoned into state agencies for proper redistribution.
Nor will it be enough for people who believe that funding is the only way to mitigate poverty. The broader debate, virtually impossible to broach these days, is whether endlessly increasing welfare actually helps in the long run.
The progressive measure of national success is predicated on how many people we can hook on government assistance rather than how many people we can free from it. It has long been known that welfare’s incentives undercut work and family formation and discourage self-sufficiency.
And we have been spending more on social safety net programs, even though we have less poverty today than ever before. The poverty rate in the United States was nearly 22 percent when we first began recording it in 1959. By 1974, roughly 12 percent of Americans lived in poverty. Today, it’s approximately 11 percent.
Meanwhile, real federal welfare spending has increased by more than 760 percent since then. Over the past 50-plus years, the poverty rate has remained incredibly consistent.
You can oppose war for a lot of reasons, but spending on defense is not a primary driver of debt, nor does it inhibit us from helping the needy. Indeed, federal military spending is one of the few major budget categories that clearly falls under Congress’s enumerated powers. And one of the vital responsibilities of the federal government is protecting the homeland, not expanding the dependent class.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
