Israel’s Jerusalem Post has published a proposal every American should read. The argument runs like this: the war on Iran cannot be sold to the American public. A ground campaign would need somewhere between 750,000 and 1.5 million troops. The active Army has about 452,000. So the gap should be closed by offering to erase the student loans, credit-card balances and car notes of Americans aged 18 to 34 in exchange for two or three years in uniform.

Look past the fact that a foreign newspaper is calculating how many American families should bury a child. Look at the mechanism. The author has identified a population under financial pressure, priced the relief, and concluded that an indebted young American can be bought for about forty thousand dollars.

At $40,000 a head, 750,000 recruits costs $30 billion. The full 1.5 million costs $60 billion.

Now set that against the bill Americans are already paying. The White House has sent Congress an $87 billion supplemental request for this war, on top of direct military operations already estimated at up to $42 billion. The Pentagon told the House Armed Services Committee the figure was $25 billion; Democratic members and outside economists put the cost to the American economy between $630 billion and $1 trillion. Independent trackers put the first 108 days alone above $113 billion.

The war has already consumed more money than every debt the author proposes to forgive, several times over. The supplemental request by itself would clear the balance sheets of more than two million young Americans.

Then there is the standing line item. Israel receives roughly $3.3 billion a year in Foreign Military Financing plus $500 million for joint missile-defence programmes. Cumulatively, the United States has provided Israel about $352 billion in aid, including $263 billion in military assistance, in inflation-adjusted terms. That sum, had it stayed home, would have discharged the non-mortgage debt of some six million Americans in exactly the cohort the Post has now marked for enlistment.

So there is a simpler version of the author’s own proposal. Cut the aid to Israel. Cut it completely and cut it now, and apply the money to the debt. The young American gets the debt relief without having to sell his life for it. His government can stop asking him to pay for someone else’s war with his blood.