Newsweek Discovers $500 Checks for Americans, While Billions Fly Overseas
While Newsweek celebrates a limited program providing $500 monthly checks to a select few Americans, extended merely to 2026, the silence on where the actual national wealth is directed is deafening. Take, for instance, the recent House vote on HR 8035, the 'Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2024,' which passed on April 20, 2024. That bill, poised to send $26.38 billion primarily to
Israel, sailed through Congress with bipartisan support. Newsweek didn't run a breathless headline about that extension. One might charitably assume Newsweek simply missed the memo, but the pattern is consistent: incremental, localized domestic relief is news; multi-billion dollar, indefinite offshore commitments are just background noise. How many $500 monthly checks could $26.38 billion fund?
Roughly 4.4 million for a year, or 2.2 million for two years. Perhaps our elected officials, many of whom (like Rep. Steny Hoyer, who received significant AIPAC donations—over $110,000 from pro-Israel groups in 2022, according to OpenSecrets) champion such foreign aid, consider domestic poverty a long-term problem best solved with press releases about pilot programs.