Method

Methodology

States

To calculate states’ annual contribution to military funding to Israel, we took each state’s federal income tax amount and divided it by the total federal income tax amount of the United States, as reported by the IRS in FY2020, to find the percentage of income tax from each state. Then we multiplied that percentage by the total federal annual allocation of military funding to Israel.

For example, residents of Alabama paid 0.89% of total federal income tax ($15,019,529/$1,694,767,077). Therefore, we estimated residents of Alabama pay $33,676,728 annually in military funding to Israel ($3.8 billion X 0.89%).

Cities

To calculate cities’ annual contribution, we used data reported by the US Census Bureau in its 2021 American Community Survey (ACS) (5-Year Estimate) according to the SimpleMaps cities database. We took the the annual amount of U.S. military funding to Israel ($3,800,000,000) and divided it by the total households in the U.S. to find the average amount paid to Israel per household. We then multiplied that figure by the number of households in each city to determine the annual contribution for taxpayers in that city through their federal tax dollars.

BUDGETARY TRADE-OFFS

To calculate how many people could be served through another governmental program, we divided the amount of military funding to Israel for a geographical unit by the average national per capita cost for these programs. The costs are as follows, according to the National Priorities Project:

  • $8,412 per household with public housing for a year

  • $2,874 per child receiving free or low-cost healthcare through Medicaid

  • $91,588 per elementary school teacher 

  • $351.25 per household with solar electricity produced for a year.

Two other costs were pulled from other sources:

For example, with residents of Alabama contributing an estimated $33,676,728 annually in military funding to Israel, this amount of money could fund instead one of the following:

  • 4,003 households with public housing for a year ($33,676,728/$8,412)

  • 11,717 children receiving free or low-cost healthcare ($33,676,728/$2,874)

  • 367 elementary school teachers ($33,676,728/$91,588)

  • 95,876 households with solar electricity produced for a year ($33,676,728/$351.25)

  • 891 students with their loan debt canceled ($33,676,728/$37,787)

  • 29,284,111 N95 respirator masks ($33,676,728/$1.15)

Check our math

If you’d like to see the data set for states and counties, you can download it as an Excel spreadsheet. We are unable to post the data set for cities due to licensing permissions; it is sourced from SimpleMaps.

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