Tucker Carlson is asking the questions too many politicians won't.

A year into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the mouthpieces of President Joe Biden's administration keep parroting each other that the U.S. will support the Ukraine government's war of self-preservation for "as long as it takes."

But what is that going to take for Americans?

Carlson has long been a vocal skeptic of the Biden administration's reflexive support for Ukraine -- a country so steeped in corruption it's a major part of the various Hunter Biden scandals swirling around the Biden White House.

For that, he's been vilified as a supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin and a stooge of the Russian intelligence forces -- usually by the kind of liberals who hated him long before they decided to show how tough-minded they are by putting Ukraine flags on their Twitter bio pics.

But no American needs to agree with Carlson in every particular about the war in Ukraine and the U.S. stance on it to understand that he's raising some very serious questions that aren't being debated by the men and women who are actually elected to lead this country.

Right now, Ukraine is absorbing a huge amount of money from Americans with barely any discussion among lawmakers, much less the general public, about whether the commitment abroad is worth the price being paid at home.

In fact, it's a pretty good bet that while most American adults are probably aware that Ukraine is seeing the largest, bloodiest fighting on the content of Europe since World War II, many fewer are aware of how much their own country has invested in the defense of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's government.

During his "Tucker Carlson Tonight" monologue Thursday -- the eve of the anniversary of the Feb. 24, 2022, Russian invasion -- Carlson tried to put the numbers into perspective.

Toward the end of the video below -- starting about the 6:30 mark -- Carlson did some ballpark estimation on how much Congress and the Biden administration have spent on assistance to Ukraine and then halved it, to $100 billion.

What could Americans have gotten for that if it had been spent on the home front instead? What if the government put America first instead of America last?

Check it out here:

It’s a measure of our media’s total corruption that no one ever asks Biden what the United States is hoping to accomplish in Ukraine. "As long as it takes" to do what? Now the objective appears to be winning World War Three against both Russia and China. pic.twitter.com/dfsTgladdE

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 24, 2023

“Let’s pretend we had only spend $100 billion in Ukraine so far," Carlson said. "What can we do with $100 billion here in the United States?

"For one thing, and this has been in the news recently, we could modernize our rail system to avoid the thousand derailments we have every year and the mushroom clouds over Ohio that sometimes result from that; $100 billion is more than five times the entire discretionary budget of the Department of Transportation. There is just $13 billion in the DOT budget for transit and less than $3 billion for Amtrak. Remember that? The artery that connects the cities on the East Coast?”

“Then there is the FAA, that’s the government agency that is supposed to prevent planes from crashing into each other, killing hundreds of Americans. The FAA got $20 billion in the last budget, $20 billion. Given that planes seem to be coming very close to hitting each other lately, it might be worth funding the FAA a little more.”

And that's not all.

"And then, of course, with that money we could do things that matter long-term, like building a wall along our southern border," Carlon said.

"We could build four of them for that. That would save ... hundreds of thousands of American lives by blocking drug traffickers from entering the country. Then you wouldn't have a cartel war in Texas and Arizona, which we're absolutely going to get."

Then he turned to domestic spending liberals would really get behind, such as paying off "half the medical debt in the entire country" and "two years of community college tuition for every young person in the United States," or paying "all out-of-pocket expenses for cancer patients for five years."

Every one of these ideas above can be debated for the merits and flaws -- except for the one about the wall on the southern border. That was needed back when former President Donald Trump was in office and Joe Biden's disastrous administration was merely a ghastly possibility. Now that Biden's catastrophe is upon us, the wall is needed now, immediately, and will be needed for a long time to come.

"That's a lot of money," Carlson said. "Why isn't Bernie Sanders doing the math on this?"

That's a good question. Why isn't every member of Congress scrutinizing this money going to Ukraine? It doesn't detract from the value of the Ukraine cause in fighting blatant Russian aggression to demand that United States tax money is spent wisely, and for the benefit of its own citizens, either now or in the future.

That's especially true, considering the current United States president basically invited the Russian invasion in the first place.

Democrats of the 21st century, under the doddering, almost certainly corrupt leadership of Joe Biden, are determined to squander trillions of dollars on the illusory so-called "Inflation Reduction Act," or the "infrastructure bill," or on aid to Ukraine without even a credible hint that the money spent now will reduce spending in the future.

The fact is, the Biden administration has spent American money, and mortgaged the American future, on an arguably kleptocratic government in Kyiv and abysmally misdirected priorities at home -- not to mention arming the Taliban, the Islamic terrorist group of Afghanistan, when Biden left more than $80 billion in equipment after the disgraceful U.S. retreat from Kabul.

Americans can engage in good-faith disagreement over whether and how much the U.S. should aid Ukraine. Americans can decide, as represented by Congress, to what degree and for how long Americans are willing to pick up the bill for a foreign nation's defense. That could be for the foreseeable future -- which the Biden administration clearly favors -- or it could simply be through the next budget cycle.

But either decision requires broad support from the American public, and that American public deserves much better than an establishment media that simply parrots the talking points of the Biden administration and congressional Democrats and tries to crucify anyone who questions it as a stooge of Vladimir Putin. (Take a look at the responses to the tweeted monologue. They're ugly.)

Fox News watchers have Tucker Carlson asking questions for them in monologues like this -- that can help define the parameters for at least some conservative lawmakers in Congress and the Americans they represent.

The rest of the country needs it even more.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.