Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Veronique de Rugy, at Reason, asks a good question: who will pay for the war? Or, how will it be paid for?

The Pentagon has requested $200 billion to fund the campaign. While circumstances could change the price tag, interest payments on that much debt would add $87 billion over 10 years. So that’s roughly $300 billion.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, asked about this number, offered a memorable contribution to the fiscal debate: “Obviously, it takes money to kill bad guys.” That’s true. It’s also true that the money must come from somewhere.

Veronique de Rugy, “How Will Congress Fund a $300 Billion War With Iran?,” Reason (March 26, 2026).

De Rugy mentions two obvious tax-and-spend choices, a supplemental appropriations bill and a budget reconciliation bill. But she goes on to make an interesting point:

Congress used to offset its emergency spending. It doesn’t anymore. Research by Dominik Lett at the Cato Institute shows that since 1991, Congress has passed $12.5 trillion in emergency spending for wars, disasters, pandemics, financial crises, and in some cases things that were emergencies in name only, like $450 million for space exploration. Almost none of it was offset. If you add $2.5 trillion in interest to the spending, the total amounts to one-third of today’s debt.

Which brings to mind a recurring theme at ThisIsCommonSense.org: the federal debt. So here is a current update on the general government’s most obvious but least talked-about (elsewhere) problem:

Note that, as reported here in November, the Congressional Budget Office had predicted hitting the $39 trillion level of debt some time after mid-year. Hey, we are ahead of schedule! Let’s celebrate?

“A Christian politician in Finland has been convicted of a crime for publishing her views on marriage and sexual ethics 22 years ago,” CBN reports.

“The country’s Supreme Court found parliamentarian Päivi Räsänen guilty of ‘hate speech’ for publishing her biblical beliefs. In a 3–2 decision, the court upheld a criminal conviction against Räsänen and a Lutheran bishop for ‘making and keeping available to the public a text that insults a group.’”

She was fined €1,800.

That is about 2,080 in American dollars.

Paul Jacob has discussed the case in the recent past, in a more hopeful vein. That is, in the apparently vain hope that the highest court of “Suomen Tasavalta” (what Finns call their state) would find this mother of five, grandmother of ten, and wife of a Lutheran pastor innocent of the grotesque charges “of crimes against the humanity of gays and lesbians.”

Oh, that cannot be right. That is from the often-unreliable Wikipedia. The formal charge appears to be “incitement against an ethnic group” (kiihottaminen kansanryhmää vastaan) under Section 10 of Chapter 11 of the Finnish Criminal Code.

The country’s hate speech provision.

How do gays and lesbians constitute an ethnic group? Stay tuned for future updates.

It is noteworthy that not all the charges brought against her came to an ultimate guilty verdict.

What stuck in the court’s craw was that she had written that homosexuality is “a developmental disorder.” The reasoning the court went through to see such a statement as “an incitement to hate” has to be fascinating.

This is especially so after the assurances of Prosecutor General Ari-Pekka Koivisto that the case “is significant because the supreme court went through the fundamental rights assessment in detail.”