Treasury Secretary Says US Has Plenty Of Money For More Wars

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen assured the world that the United States "certainly" has enough money to fight another war right now. Yellen's comments were about the war in Israel, and she wanted the world to know that the US will continue funding that conflict along with sending aide to Ukraine. Meanwhile, the federal government only has a few more weeks until we hit a shutdown due to a lack of budget bills being passed, and we're repeatedly told as a country that we can't "afford" things like student loan debt forgiveness and universal healthcare. But there's always money for war, as Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Early Monday morning, treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, assured the world that the United States has plenty of money. She says, we certainly have enough money for another war. Here's her statement. America can certainly afford to stand with Israel and to support Israel's military needs. And we also can and must support Ukraine in its struggle against Russia. America has also made clear to Israel, we're working very closely with the Israelis, that they have a right to defend themselves, but it's important to try to try to try to spare innocent civilian lives to the maximum extent possible. So Janet Yellen, you know, finance lady out there talking forward policy, you know, like, oh, don't worry, I'm in charge of the money. We got plenty of money for war. And uh, you know, we've kind of told 'em, Hey, if you don't have to kill civilians, try not to. But this isn't about the war. This is about the audacity of that statement, which might be one of the most disgusting things I've ever heard. We certainly have money to fund two different wars right now.

Now, this is not about the attacks from Hamas against Israel. This is not about Israel's collective punishment of Palestinians. This, I'm not waiting into that in this segment. This is about the United States. There's always money for war. Doesn't matter who it is, doesn't matter where it is. The war machine always has enough cash to keep it going no matter what. Now, we ask for things like universal healthcare because medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy here in the United States. Tens of millions of Americans, I think actually well over a hundred million Americans have medical debt of some sort. I have medical debt right now, but we can't afford universal healthcare. We can't afford debt-free college. We can't afford student loan debt forgiveness. We don't have the money for it. They tell us every time we bring it up. Agree, new deal. We can't afford to take action on climate change and create a better life and prevent thousands of premature deaths each year, which is what those investments would do. No, no, no. We can't spend money to save lives, but we can spend money to kill people overseas. We've always got money for planes and tanks and bombs and drones and guns and bullets,

Everything. But no, you cannot have universal healthcare. We just, it's not in, it's not in the budget. We don't have it now. We can't protect the environment. 11 point a half percent of the American public, over 39 million people live at or below the poverty line here in the United States. 11.5% of the population. Student lunch debt is a thing in America. And we are constantly told that, no, we can't afford to give kids free lunches. We gotta spend that money on new F 15 fighter jets because our buddies over here need 'em. Ignore the human rights abuses of the people we're selling weapons to, whether it's in Israel or Saudi Arabia or wherever. We don't care about their histories of doing those things. We just want the money because we love money and we have lots of money to do these things. But I'm sorry, American citizens, we don't have money to take care of you. We don't have money to ensure that you have a habitable country 20 years from now. But when it comes to the war machine, we'll always, always find a way to fund it.