Lindsay Koshgarian talks about her group’s recent report, “Tax Day 2026: Taxpayers Are Paying More than $4,000 for War.” The report notes that while more than half of Americans are struggling to afford basic necessities, Donald Trump and the GOP passed the “Big Ugly Bill” that cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans, cut health insurance and food assistance for millions of Americans, and added billions in new spending for war and mass deportations. More recently amid the U.S. war on Iran, the president has asked Congress for a record $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon in 2027, representing a 40-44 percent increase over previous spending.
SCOTT HARRIS: My name’s Scott Harris, here on listener-supported WPKN in Bridgeport. We’re speaking this evening with Lindsay Koshgarian, program director with the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. Lindsay, as you said, Trump and the Republican’s big obscene budget bill, as I call it, and maybe critics call it—big cuts, historic cuts in Medicaid, Medicare, the SNAP food and nutrition programs and other social safety net services that millions of lower- and middle-income Americans depend on. Do you have numbers handy about how many people will be losing their health insurance after the midterm elections? Because as you said before, this bill was designed not to kick in in terms of throwing all those people off their health insurance until after the November election.
LINDSAY KOSHGARIAN: That’s right. So some of the things were things that the bill should have kept going and didn’t. So one of those is subsidies to help people afford the extremely expensive cost of health insurance premiums, which were under the Affordable Care Act. So that just got much more expensive. If you get health insurance, private health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, you would have gotten some government help that has now disappeared. And so a lot of people on those insurance programs have seen their premiums double or even more. And we know already there’s evidence that at least a million people have declined to renew their insurance because of that. So we have that evidence already. That’s just the very early beginnings. The numbers from that will probably only go higher as people have to actually pay those premiums and aren’t able to do so and more people will lose insurance. And then the new Medicaid rules really go into effect in the fall.
Altogether, there are projections that as many as 17 million people could lose their health insurance from these different changes to Medicaid and to the Affordable Care Act and even to Medicare also.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, we talked about the $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget that’s being requested for 2027. I know often at the Priorities Project, you talk about the money being spent on the Pentagon and what those dollars could buy if they were dedicated to domestic programs here in the United States that many people see as critical funding that really actually could save lives such as, as you mentioned, restoring Medicaid and Medicare health insurance. People don’t have health insurance. There are many surveys out there and I’m sure you know about the specific numbers, but there’s a certain number of people, certain number of Americans who die every year because they don’t have access to health insurance. So these are life and death issues.
LINDSAY KOSHGARIAN: They absolutely are life and death issues. And as a matter of fact, there was a study that came out last year looking at the big bad bill, the one that cut Medicaid and didn’t extend additional help for the Affordable Care Act and all of these other things that I just mentioned—and found that because of the health insurance and healthcare that people would lose as a direct result of those changes, it could result in 51,000 unnecessary deaths. So it really is life or death, these changes. And it’s not just, “Do I have a health insurance card in my pocket?” It means real healthcare and real medical consequences for thousands of people. And of course, 51,000 deaths, that’s the worst of it. That’s nothing to say that many, many more people who would have some kind of worse health consequences, which could be very serious and still just not to the level of an actual death, but so there are just countless people who will lose healthcare and necessary healthcare as a result of this and all just to fund these wars and all just to fund this mass deportation agenda and tax cuts for the wealthy.
And so that’s not a good trade.
SCOTT HARRIS: Not at all. Lindsay, in terms of Pentagon spending, the current $1 trillion that’s being spent on defense and the wars, as well as the $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget for 2027—as I look at some of the stats on this, the American budget for our military is really an amount of money that’s staggering, as we’ve said. But it really totals much, much more than the top 10 or 12 countries in what they spend on their military combined. Maybe you could just address that quickly because just to put it in perspective in terms of, yeah, America has the world’s most deadly military force as we’re seeing in Iran. But it dwarfs any other military, in fact, a combination of a dozen other militaries.
LINDSAY KOSHGARIAN: That’s right. So just to underscore this, they’re asking for a $1.5 trillion budget now. They have not gotten it. And so one of the things that, if people are concerned about this issue, what we have to do is let our members of Congress know that we don’t want that to happen. But even before that happened, even before we hit a $1 trillion, the U.S. was already spending on our military more than the next 9 to 10 countries combined, depending on the year. And that means also we’re spending three times more than China, which is the number two country and the adversary that the U.S. mlitary says they’re the most concerned about. And we spend three times as much already, even before this huge increase that they’re asking for. We spend many, many more times than that. Russia is the next country and we spend many more times than that than them.
And then after that, we actually get to countries that are … Many of the countries after that are actually our allies. And so if you combine U.S. spending with our allies’ spending, the picture is even more lopsided. So the idea that we somehow need to spend this much for our security is just completely unjustified. But instead, what this level of spending is doing is it’s making … if you think about where the U.S. military has been and what we’ve been up to for the last several years, we’ve sent countless weapons to Ukraine since 2022 for them to fight off the Russian invasion. We’ve sent countless weapons to Israel for them to conduct their genocide in Gaza and now the accelerated attacks on Lebanon that Israel is now doing. We have invaded Venezuela earlier this year and kidnapped their president. We have attacked Iran and who knows how long that will—that’s paused at the moment—but who knows how long that will continue and all of this is made possible by the level of military spending that they’re saying is not enough.
So if all of that is possible under $1 trillion or less military budget, just think of how much they would be able to do if we give them a $1.5 trillion military budget. We absolutely have to stop that because it will result in more wars and more of this type of violence all over the world.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. The defense industry in this country, they have a very well-funded and effective lobbying arm and they certainly sell more weapons when we’re at war somewhere than when we aren’t. So there’s some incentive there, which is pretty perverse.
Lindsay, I did want to talk about Pentagon spending and the defense industry. As I understand it, for many decades now, the strategy in allocating congressional funds for the military is to allocate these funds to various congressional districts across the U.S. to ensure broad political support from both Democrats and Republicans. And the argument, of course, being that the money that’s coming out of Washington to your district or my district or your congressman’s district is creating jobs. And that gets to be important in political campaigns every couple of years. Tell us about how the military, the Pentagon, the administration—both Democrats and Republicans do it—how they sprinkle that money all across the country to ensure support because it’s linked to jobs.
LINDSAY KOSHGARIAN: Absolutely.This is a big part of the reason why we haven’t been able to make reasonable cuts to military spending—is this jobs issue. So the way the story goes is, yes, you take a weapons contractor. So let’s take Lockheed Martin, which is the number one weapons contractor in the United States and let’s take their flagship program, which is the F-35 jet fighter. At one point, they were manufacturing parts or had service contracts or subcontracts for the F-35 jet fighter in over 300 congressional districts out of 435. So well more than half of congressional districts had some direct economic connection that they could claim to the F-35 jet fighter. Now, in some of those districts, that may have been one job or even maybe half a job. It wasn’t necessarily meaningful, but they had that connection, that claim that they could make that were creating jobs in this congressional district.
And what that means is that then members of Congress are afraid to vote against the funding for this program, which this is a program that Sen. John McCain, who was no peacenick, called a scandal and a tragedy because it had so many malfunctions and had gone so over-budget and so behind schedule and so many problems with the F-35. So that’s what we’re facing.
But what we know on the other hand is for one thing, there was an industry study from the defense manufacturing industry that found that even while military spending has gone up and the dollar amounts of their contracts have also gone up, there used to be three million of those weapons manufacturing jobs in this country in the 1980s, and today there are only one million. So those more and more dollars are buying fewer and fewer jobs. And that’s something that’s so important for us to know and so important for our members of Congress to know so that we can push back against this idea that somehow this is a magical job creator, when in fact we know that dollar for dollar, if we invest that same money in education or in healthcare or in clean energy or in so many other things, we can actually create more jobs with that money than we can by putting it into weapons manufacturing.
SCOTT HARRIS: That’s so important to know. And it’s a good place to leave this conversation as we’re out of time. Lindsay, thank you for all that you do at the Priorities Project and do leave our listeners with a web address where folks can find the Tax Day 2026 report.
LINDSAY KOSHGARIAN: Thanks so much, Scott. You can find our tax receipt at nationalpriorities.org.
SCOTT HARRIS: That’s simple enough. Lindsay, thanks for all the bad news.
LINDSAY KOSHGARIAN: Thank you. I’ll try to bring back better news next time.
SCOTT HARRIS: No, no. As you said, importantly, people can raise their voice if they don’t like what we’re seeing unfold here with the budgets past, present and future.
LINDSAY KOSHGARIAN: Absolutely.
SCOTT HARRIS: Bye. That’s Lindsay Koshgarian, program director with the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.
