The cheapest gallon of Russian crude is the most expensive thing America buys. Every dollar we and our allies send to Moscow funds the missiles hitting Ukrainian apartment buildings, the salaries of the soldiers occupying Ukrainian farmland, and the propaganda machine that calls our allies Nazis. That’s the real cost on American families — and it isn’t Senator Lindsey Graham’s sanctions bill. That bill, which Senator Rand Paul tore apart in a recent Fox News opinion column titled DC’s Russia sanctions bill won’t stop Putin — but it will hurt you, is the first serious attempt in four years to make that cost visible. Paul’s argument boils down to one sentence: tariffs hurt consumers, so let’s keep buying Russian oil. It’s the most expensive free lunch in American foreign policy.
Paul calls the Graham bill the “largest tax increase ever passed by a Republican Congress.” He notes the bill authorizes up to 500% tariffs on Russian goods and 100% tariffs on countries that keep importing Russian oil. He’s right about the mechanism, and I’ll grant it plainly: tariffs are paid by American importers and passed through to consumers at Walmart, Costco, and Home Depot. That cost is real, and any honest supporter of the bill has to own it.
But Paul stops one step short of the full accounting. He counts the cost of acting and calls it a tax. He doesn’t count the cost of not acting and call it anything at all. That cost is the war itself — the over $175 billion the United States has committed to Ukraine since 2022, the defense budget swollen partly by the need to deter a Russian military that Western energy purchases keep funded, and the energy-price volatility that has whipsawed American households every time the conflict escalates. Paul presents the tariff as the tax. The tariff is the down payment. The tax is every dollar of Russian oil revenue that buys another missile, extends the war by another month, and keeps American families paying for a conflict that cheap oil supposedly lets them ignore. Paul counted the line item on the receipt and missed the total at the bottom.
Now let’s walk through where Paul says the bill won’t work. Russia has been hit with more than 26,000 sanctions. Its economy has contracted. Its access to Western technology has been cut. Its oil customers have been pushed to look elsewhere. None of this brought Putin to his knees in a month, so Paul concludes sanctions don’t work. This is the same logic as saying exercise doesn’t work because you haven’t lost fifty pounds by Tuesday. Sanctions degrade an adversary’s industrial base, drain its treasury, and limit its ability to replace the million-plus casualties it has already taken. They aren’t a light switch. They’re a ratchet. The Graham bill turns that ratchet harder against the countries propping up Putin’s war fund: China, India, Japan, and a handful of European holdouts.
Then Paul warns that punishing those countries will push them into Russia’s arms, especially India. But India is already buying Russian oil at a steep discount. India is already inside Russia’s arms. The bill’s pressure isn’t pushing India away from us — it’s pulling India away from the discount Moscow offers on blood-soaked crude. The choice Paul presents — keep buying Russian oil and stay friends with India, or sanction the buyers and lose India — is a false one. We’re losing leverage either way. The only question is whether we use what we still have before it’s gone.
And then Paul warns about the “unilateral authority” the bill gives the president. This is the giveaway. Paul’s real objection isn’t the economics. It’s that any president, Republican or Democrat, might use economic leverage against a foreign adversary without first asking permission from every senator and every trading partner that benefits from the status quo. He wants a foreign policy that requires unanimous consent from the countries enriching Putin. That’s not a policy. That’s a veto.
The Graham bill doesn’t invent a cost American families have to pay. It surfaces one they’ve been paying since February 2022, when the war started and we all decided cheap Russian oil was a dependency we could live with. The countries Paul worries about aren’t bystanders in this war. They’re the export market that lets Putin keep firing. Every barrel of Russian crude they refine and resell is a barrel whose revenue lands in a military budget aimed at Ukraine — and, by extension, at the NATO allies American soldiers are sworn to defend.
Here’s what to build instead — and I mean actually build, not just argue about.
Start with the money. Norway discovered oil in 1969 and put the revenue into a sovereign wealth fund that today holds over two trillion dollars — roughly $390,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country. Texas discovered oil around the same time and built a boom and a bumper sticker. The difference wasn’t geology. It was the institution. Alaska runs a smaller version of the same thing: the Permanent Fund has mailed a dividend check to every Alaskan since 1982, in the reddest state in the union. An American sovereign wealth fund, capitalized by energy revenues and invested in domestic infrastructure, would treat energy independence as a long-term public asset instead of a slogan that evaporates every time oil prices drop. Nobody ever called Anchorage the Kremlin.
Then the finance. The Bank of North Dakota — state-owned, profitable every single year since 1919 — provides low-cost financing for in-state energy, agriculture, and infrastructure. It has survived a century of conservative governance without once becoming a command economy. A network of state-level public banks, capitalized by energy revenues and directed toward domestic energy infrastructure, would replace dependence on adversary oil with the boring, durable machinery of public finance. If Bismarck can run a state-owned bank, so can Baton Rouge.
Then ownership. There are roughly 900 rural electric cooperatives serving 42 million Americans across 56% of the country’s landmass — member-owned utilities that wired rural America when investor-owned companies said it wasn’t profitable enough. Those co-ops are the institutional skeleton for community-owned energy. When a co-op invests in solar or wind, the savings stay in the county. When a distant oil exporter raises prices, the co-op’s members aren’t hostage to it. That’s not ideology. That’s a fuse box that belongs to the people using it.
The alternative to Paul’s “don’t tax cheap Russian oil” isn’t a tariff alone. It’s a set of institutions that reduce the dependence the tariff is trying to price in. Norway did it with a fund. North Dakota did it with a bank. Alaska did it with a dividend. Forty-two million Americans did it with a cooperative. None of these required abolishing the market. All of them required choosing to own something instead of renting it from a country that wants you dependent.
Senator Paul wants to lower the price of Russian oil. The right goal is to make Russian oil irrelevant. Build the fund. Build the bank. Build the cooperative. Then the tariff isn’t a tax — it’s a negotiating position.