Yeah the issue isn’t that we’re allocating money for our citizens to foreign aid.
We have the money to do both. But a huge portion of citizens don’t want their taxes going towards helping their fellow citizens.
No... this is a mischaracterization. People don't trust their government with higher taxes because they know their government is misallocating the money it already has. I would happily pay more in taxes if the 30% I do pay actually was spent wisely. Instead we have massively wasteful organizations like the pentagon that just "lose" money. Instead we have corrupt politicians whose children spend tax payer dollars on cocaine and hookers.
Then step up. It’s not “they the politicians,” it’s “we the people”. Get involved in a local good government organization, visit your Congressperson, get to know your city council member. Even when I disagree with them, I recognize that most politicians are civic-minded people who want to do public service.
Being like “all politicians are stealing from the public coffers” completely misunderstand how even corruption works: usually the take bribes from companies or misuse donor funds.
You aren’t just cynical, you’re utterly ignorant about how corruption actually works. Do you think Hunter Biden was buying coke with Obamacare bucks or something? Grow the hell up.
I didn't say all were. But I agree with your general statement. In general it's the career politicians. Should be term limits and addtl controls of members of congress to prevent insider trading and such. Congress needs more everyday people and less career politicians.
Hunter spent like $800,000 on hookers and coke, and he didn't get that from selling paintings. He's the presidents son for Christ sake. Of course he gets cash from Biden. You're not on coke right now, are you?
Yes, there are more forms of corruption that bribery and embezzlement is clearly one of them.
Hunter Biden joined the Navy Reserve in his mid-thirties and was pinned Ensign by his VP dad in the White House itself. He attended his first drill and popped hot for cocaine.
Yes, shit like that absolutely costs taxpayer dollars.
What we know actually happens is if taxes go up then Washington bureaucrats take more of it. Nothing really changes, but the tax increase won't go away
What money? Aren't we 33 trillion in debt? Why can't we have officials who manage to spend less by compromising with the right by saying ok we gonna spend this on our citizens instead? If they demonize that as the evil socialism then ask them what the heck the current situation is
"You need to help that family."
"I'm trying to take care of my own family."
"But who's going to help that family?"
"Themselves! Just like my family. If you take from my family to help that family, there won't be enough left for my family."
"Don't worry. We'll make someone help your family."
>helping their fellow citizens.
Because the majority of people who end up homeless end up homeless because of drugs. No one gets addicted to drugs by accident. It's always their decision to try some despite being told to stay away by literally everyone.
That's a decision they made and there is no reason why I should jave to pay for that mistake when I have plenty of places I need to spend my own money to take care of my family members and friends who actually deserve the money.
Also the cost of housing feeding and Healthcare for someone is extremely high and why the fu k should the rest of us who are struggling to get enough for ourselves slave away so that deadbeat losers can live for free?
Sorry to those who actually had bad luck, but most of them manage to get back on their feet eventually anyway.
Some people in Manhattan have been living 100% rent free in government housing for decades without anything to show for it. After all why should they try to move out when people making 150k a year can't even afford to live the way they do? Just sit back relax and live like a wealthy tycoon and have the taxpayers pick up the bull forever.
Actually, the research shows that most people who become homeless land there for financial or other regular reasons.
They then become drug addicts after becoming homeless because of the situation.
The cycle then just continues down.
Do you think people who get addicted to prescription drugs never end up on the streets addicted to different, yet very similar, drugs? At what point in their addiction do you stop thinking of them as a human?
If by, no one gets addicted by accident, you mean no one is prescribed painkillers after a major accident and becomes addicted to doctor prescribed medications meant to alleviate a legitimate medical issue, you are incorrect. It is the source of addiction far too commonly in many of the child protection cases I deal with daily.
There is a LOT of ignorance about how much counties, like the US, spend on foreign aid. It’s a fraction of one percent. The only aid that is more than that is military aid, and that’s less “helping people” than supporting American foreign policy interests. People routinely vastly overestimate how much aid money there is.
That second part is the important part. The US government - in fact, NO government - just gives tens of millions of dollars to foreign countries out of pure altruism. They're buying behavior that is in Americans' interest. Look at one of the most iconic examples of US foreign aid, the Marshall Plan. We gave $13 billion dollars (equivalent to $170 billion in today's money) to Western European countries after WWII, and in return we got eager trade partners and stable, strong allies against the Soviet Union.
Security aid to East Asia buys trade partners. Food aid to Africa fights terrorism. Military aid to Ukraine defangs one of our major geopolitical competitors without putting a single American soldier in harm's way. You can take issue with what exactly we're buying with foreign aid, but we don't give anything away for free.
How much did we spend on disaster aid when we weren’t supporting Ukraine? Seems like the numbers are unrelated, and that maybe you oppose aid for Ukraine for other reasons but are being dishonest about what those are.
Money in high interest loans is a small fraction of any aid given to Ukraine. The majority is old weapons that is sitting unused. You are uninformed buddy.
We are not merely providing outdated weaponry. A friend of mine still serving in the Marine Corps told me they have a shortage of artillery shells, hindering their intended training sessions. Live fire training has been significantly reduced due to the reason of how much we gave to Ukraine.
75 was the start, it's up to over 150 billion now.
Meanwhile, our border is wide open and our streets are filled with homeless people.
Do you think 150 billion dollars could "solve" the homeless problem? I sure do. They could give a million dollars to each homeless person in the country. LOL. Leftists are too blind to see the truth.
Our border is not and never has been wide open. Look I get it you're special and you need the visual aide of a useless fence or border wall but even without those visual aides we are not wide open.
If we were wide open we would be getting a fuck ton more illegals than we currently get.
>Leftists are too blind to see the truth.
Wtf do you think the right is going to do? They aren't going to use shit of that money for anything social cause that would be a handout or gasp "communism" (it's actually would be socialism but dumb fucks on the right don't know the difference).
That money would go to their pockets or the pockets of the rich. None of it would go anywhere it's needed. And the "trickle down" part will never trickle down cause those companies and billionaires aren't obligated to trickle it down. It will go right into theor personal wallets or their companies wallets. And none of that would go to where it's needed. No pay raises. Nothing of the sorta. A bit of the money would get donated but that's for tax purposes. So companies can keep more of the money.
You are too blind to see the truth.
It is not wide open? Over 300,000 people walked across it illegally last month. Over 5 million since 2020. If that is not wide open I don't know what is.
No it isn't. You understand nothing about anything. Get off your fox news bullshit and actually read about how we conduct our borders. I get it, it's "work" to read up on this but it's fascinating when you actually understand. Our borders are not wide open. And the parts where it had a wall or a fence, guess what? They just climb over it with rope and a ladder. It's not fucking hard to get over them. Borders walls and fences are useless garbage that fucks up the ecosystems and ecology in the area.
Are you denying that 300,000 people entered the country illegally last month and over 5 million people have entered the country illegally since 2020? These are numbers straight from the DHS. Are you saying they are lying?
Most of the money for Ukraine was given to American weapons manufacturers who then sent the equipment to Ukraine. In other words, very little of the aid for Ukraine actually gets spent in Ukraine.
Maui got aid immediately.
Biden approved Gov. Green's request for a federal disaster declaration on August 10, while the fire was still burning. No delay.
No, we're not sending cash to Ukraine. We're sending old military equipment that is no longer what the US military currently uses. We started with stuff old enough that it was otherwise slated to be destroyed--which would have cost us money. We've been moving upward through more current equipment, but still not what we're currently using.
Even when we do "give money" to other countries, it's nearly all conditional on it being spent to buy what they need *from the US.*
The $700 initial cash relief per household from FEMA is a drop in the bucket of the federal aid money being spent in Hawaii.
Israel for example receives 3 Billion a year is military aid, which is basically a discount coupon for US weapons. New York Police department has a budget of about 6 Billion, We pay because we need safe passage of ships through the suez, and to prevent the region to spilling over in war, that is why after Israel, Egypt is a close ally.
We save far more by paying the 5 billion every year, than say have inflation of 10%
I’m not very political or even tapped into it but i’ve seen something that the US has sent over $50 billion to Ukraine (google says $75 billion) and it would only take about $20 billion to end homelessness
It's 50 billion in value, not hard cash.
If we send them, say, 50 tanks that were made in the 80's and value them at 200 million, we sent them 200 million in tanks, but not 200 million cash.
We do this so we can bill them later if they win, AND when we do give them money we say, "Alright, here's 400 million dollars, but you HAVE to spend buying HIMARS rockets."
Who makes HIMARS rockets? Well, we do of course. So it just goes right back into our economy.
So it's not a total net loss.
Yes, and this is true of a lot of the aid that the US gives to other countries. It's often either goods produced in the US or else money that must be spent to buy goods produced in the US.
Much of what we've sent to Ukraine has actually saved us money.
The Javelin and stinger missiles weren't too far from being old enough that they were going to be destroyed, which costs money.
We don't really use stinger missiles much because we bring Air superiority with us wherever we send troops.
Diplomacy is definitely an investment (and always existed, we kinda want out neighbours and allies on the same wavelength, foreign aid helps that, it also helps ensure similar treatment if your country is in trouble too. They are transactional by nature).
Well... It's not an "investment" in that Ukraine is going to pay us back; that part is just wrong 😐. Most of the assistance is straight up military aid (ie donations) and much of the "loans" are posturing to fiscal conservatives who don't understand foreign policy - the majority of those "loans" will be quietly forgiven later on.
It absolutely **is** an investment in that having a stable and democratic government in Ukraine helps European / NATO security enormously. If the US allows Russia to steamroll Ukraine (which conservatives are quietly pushing for, for... reasons.) It's not like it will be *cheap* for NATO to maintain an extended front against Russia, and/or to re-take Ukraine (either in terms of material, and also lives). It's absolutely "a stitch in time saves nine" situation.
Additionally, when the US announces an aid package, a lot of that cost is recouped in different ways - people have mentioned sending old and soon-to-expire equipment, while allocating the money to order replacements. Much of that work happens in the US, and so that money gets paid to US companies and workers, who then turn around and pay US taxes. Plus it's money that would have to be spent *anyway* to replace expired equipment / ordinance, and you safe on disposal costs, etc. If you look even further out, there are real advantages in keeping domestic arms manufacturing in business also, in terms of encouraging them to maintain / expand production lines, R&D, etc.
Anyway, the point is it doesn't actually "cost" us zero dollars to support Ukraine... But a "200 million" aid package isn't really costing 200 million either. Exactly how much it "costs" in the end depends on a huge number of assumptions and some complex economic calculations, but it's absolutely *not* 200million. More importantly though, it would take *trillions* of dollars to re-stabilize the region after a Russian annexation, if that's even logistically possible at all. (Remember that Russia is a nuclear state, so... Direct conflict with Russia isn't ideal 😅).
The money spent helping Ukraine is a super cheap way to keep Russia's army weak, thus increasing our security. It's a bargain.
Abandoning Ukraine is playing into Putin's plans. I don't know why some politicians like Russia more than America.
Also it doesn’t take 20 billion dollars to end homelessness, seriously, the reasons why people are homeless don’t suddenly go away once people have homes. You could build slums for everybody to “have a home” but that would not necessarily improve most people situation.
Drug addiction being the biggest thing, you could give a drug addict a mansion and a stable job, and the chances that they beat it is EXTREMELY low. Wanna know why you hear tons of stories about celebrities and rich people who fell off and OD? But you don’t hear many stories about drug addicts that become celebrities.
Giving away old military equipment can benefit US as well. Because old stuff we don't currently use still need to be maintained and eventually destroyed, which all cost money. It's a great way to save money in the future while improving relation with a country that can further out interest.
We’ve sent at minimum 26B in financial assistance, dated from Jan 2022-2023. Yes, the majority of aid has been military, but to say we’re not supplying financial support is false.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-us-aid-ukraine-money-equipment-714688682747
that's because of the way that number is calculated - the US isn't "sending money" to ukraine in any meaningful amounts.
The US is LOANING money to ukraine at relatively high interest rates
The US is giving billions of dollars "worth of military goods" - but what that actually means is that 10 years ago the US spent an (inflation adjusted) billion dollars making a million rounds of rifle ammo and 100,000 rifles, and those rifles and ammo are both obsolete so we're SELLING them to ukraine to use to fight russia, so that we don't need to send our own populous to go fight russia instead. The actual cost of this is just shipping cost - if we weren't giving it to ukraine it would be getting thrown away or sitting in an old warehouse gathering dust - and that shipping cost is almost certainly less than the amount we're charging ukraine for the goods. This is also why that number has so much variability, because the value is being estimated and inflation adjusted from initial manufacturing and development costs, instead of being the actual sale-price.
\~\~\~\~\~\~\~
so while you can look at every the US is giving ukraine and total it's value to multi-billions of dollars, the OPPORTUNITY COST of the aid - or the money that is going to ukraine that could have gone to US citizens instead - is maybe a few tens of millions of dollars, which is maybe 1-2% of the annual domestic welfare budget; and the US is expecting to get most of that back in interest payments for loans. It's actually likely that all told the US will GAIN money from "sending aid" to ukraine. Just like the US government came out of the 2008 bailout LOANS with a multi-billion dollar profit after all the loans were paid back with interest and all the company shares the government bought were resold for profits.
I believe some of this. One corroborating point is when the military was running low on funds to pay for arms in their budget they "found" a bunch of money by devaluing the arms previously sent to Ukraine.
And that money mostly goes to U.S. arms suppliers, so the U.S. is actually borrowing money and giving it to Lockheed and the rest.
I didn't even particularly want to get deeper into the economics in this space, but yes almost all of the money being "sent" is being spent on domestic manufacturing and thereby the US is giving itself money for most of this.
So, the short answer is the US spends way too much money on military stuff instead of helping their own people, and then turns around and sells the over abundance of equipment to other countries for an imaginary number that no country can ever pay down?
You seem to think that without military stuff, everybody would play nice and other countries would not invade, curtail American interests, and start wars.
You seem to be insinuating that if we did not help strengthen our allies, that our enemies would not invade them because they are weak... Is that the insinuation? That if a place like Russia sees a country that's not able to defend itself it won't invade? Why? Because it won't be a "challenge"?
Please reread.
I'm saying: Without the US spending on military stuff, does he expect other countries to play nice, not invade countries and start wars?
Aaaah yeah okay, sorry I misread you. You weren't stating that YOU thought that you were asking if THEY thought that lol basically asking them the same thing I asked you 🤣 my bad
There 40 millions poor in the USA. 20 Billion, is giving once 500$ to each of them once. That is not much and will not achieve anything big. Basically a few month later, the situation is back to square 1. Nothing changed.
That's true if you do the lazy method of handing them all cash. Instead what you do is set up programs to help solve the issues that are causing homelessness, like drug addiction and lack of readily and affordable access to mental health services. Even if we had the money to hand them all 100k each, without those services, a large portion of them would end up right back on the streets within a year or two.
If we are being honest, a large portion will be on the streets again regardless of amount provided. You can get people into rehab but you can't keep them sober. Less than 1% of people with alcoholism or addiction issues will ever get sober.
A significant amount of the aid packages have been training and military equipment. US gives older munitions, vehicles, equipment, etc. to Ukraine and then buys new stuff for its own troops. This new material they buy is then bought through or from US companies. So much of the money spent staying in circulation within America kinda. Of the financial support directly to Ukraine, it's a mix of money, grants, and loans.
I’m from San Francisco, have done work with some great groups fighting homelessness here, but even I am very skeptical that spending more money to fight homelessness will solve the problem automatically. There are a lot of contradictory policies and cultural issues the U.S. would have to confront to significantly reduce homelessness.
Just my opinion though.
I read the link you shared, and I believe it's $20 billion per year. Not a one-time $20 billion expenditure.
But that is a price that our country could absolutely afford, and even afford while also doubling what we've given to Ukraine. It hasn't happened because Congress hasn't chosen to fund it. Not because we are sending "that money" somewhere else.
Isn't that a theoretical amount based on perfect spending/output? Vs reality like this [https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/18/heres-how-the-federal-government-wastes-tax-money.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/18/heres-how-the-federal-government-wastes-tax-money.html)
Actually it would take a lot more than 20 billion .. sorry to burst your bubble. A lot of cities already spend billions to help homeless.
It is the Republicans in Congress that refuse to help the States have a federal response worth a darn.. Making homelessness a Federal issue because it is in every State.
In addition to what everyone else said, Russia is a foreign policy threat to our allies and us, and sending that aid to Ukraine is keeping that threat in check. It’s essentially the same reason why, before Pearl Harbor happened and we entered WWII officially, the US sent tons of aid in the form of weapons and even things like military escorts for trade ships to the UK. Because FDR knew that is the UK fell to Hitler, that was going to be very bad for everyone. Right now, aid to Ukraine is preventing Putin from overrunning it and then turning to Poland and the Baltic states, which are our NATO allies, which would mean Americans would actually be sent there to fight.
Great job. Over 100,000 dead Ukrainian men since the start of the war instead of maybe trying to negotiate a cease fire. That's what I call a catastrophe. Maybe our ivy league educated 'superior's' running US foreign policy should be held accountable for their disastrous strategy. Or maybe they are too bloated on the piles of Ukrainian aid money they laundered.
As opposed to Russia just absorbing the country. That’s probably the ceasefire terms you’d like to see. Yeah it is a catastrophe, maybe dictators like Putin shouldn’t go on invading other countries? I think Ukraine would be happy to agree to a ceasefire if Russian troops just went back to their own border.
We will never know, will we? We told them to go straight to war and sentenced tens of thousands of Ukrainian men to their deaths. Our foreign policy "experts" in DC promised Russia would collapse by now. How did that work out? And now they are closer to China than ever. And with China threatening to take Taiwan, a war with Yemen....all amid record debt and dangerously low military recruitment, I can't think of a more brilliant strategic planning from the geniuses in DC. I'm so glad adults are in charge.
There are very good reasons for helping people in other countries. Have you considered that refugees wouldn't leave their homes to come here if they could get their needs met at home?
Also, desperate need can lead to radicalization, which can lead to terrorism.
And, when there are disasters, countries help each other out; the U.S. often sends less help than do other countries.
Homelessness isn't completely up to the government to solve. Landlords need to be encouraged to offer reasonable rates rather than charging top dollar for maximum profit. Employers need to pay a living wage so that workers can afford housing. Company profits have gone up, up, up since the 80s but most didn't pass much of the increase to employees. GREED in the private sectors needs to be addtessed.
https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2021/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/424159/pay-gap-between-ceos-and-average-workers-in-world-by-country/
ah yes because giving the homeless population our surplus military weaponry is really gonna combat our domestic welfare issues, and we will 100% expect any welfare we give to be repaid with interest in 10-15 years!
*ah yes because giving the homeless population our surplus military weaponry is really gonna combat our domestic welfare issues*
Not with that attitude it’s not. My own studies lead me to believe at least half the homeless population would turn on each other once fully armed theoretically eliminating 25% of themselves. That means the other 25% left over from the initial bloodbath would be incarcerated. So just by arming the homeless we automatically house 25% while eliminating another 25% which means you’ve cut homelessness in half. Of course there will be some collateral damage but there always is.
I wanna put the /s but at the same time I think this could really work.
The money the US is providing to ukraine is a loan that will be repaid. The goods the us is giving Ukraine is surplus military equipment. The homeless can't repay a loan and don't want our 20 year old obsolete military equipment.
Learn economics before you complain about economic policy
Yes, the corrupt country currently loosing an entire generation of men and women that has had it industrial base destroyed and will likely take YEARS to recovery is going to pay all the money back on top of getting everyone who fled to come back. I am aware it is a loan. The point has still clearly gone right over your head.
You're retarded.
It's a case of spending $50 Billion and 30K Ukrainian lives to stop the Russians now, or spending a $1 Trillion and 30K American soldiers' lives later.
Paying Ukraine to fight Russia in place of doing it ourselves is an economic steal.
So, it's not a here vs there argument. It would need to be a stop Russia vs social services spending argument.
You're thinking like a child... Or a Republican... Honestly, the two are so similar that it's hard to tell.
They are sending billions of dollars worth of equipment. Not billions of dollars.
Do you want to give a homeless dude an M1 Abrahams tank and a few hundred thousand dollars worth of weapons and ammo? Do you *really* think that's a good idea?
We *can't* invest "here" because a certain party (Republicans) doesn't allow us to invest in our own people. Ever.
Also, and here's the truth, every penny in aid we send to Ukraine is a US soldier's life that isn't being wasted.
Let me be clear, and don't get this twisted, but Russia is *not our friend.* Sooner or later we *will* have to fight Russia. That's inevitable. We can either give Ukraine the tools needed to defend themselves and defeat Russia now, or we can be prepared to do it ourselves when Russia attacks a NATO country, which they *will* do.
Every Russian soldier felled and every Russian weapon fired and every piece of Russian material that is destroyed is one less soldier we have to fight, one less missile we have to shoot down, and one less thing we have to destroy. Period.
Ukraine has done more for us than you can know. They have stalled the "Great Russian Army" to a stand still. They're weakening our enemies, which strengthens and protects us.
You want to reinvest in the US people? Joe Biden has done that. That's why we're in an economic boom and we didn't have a recession. Trump and the Republicans are TERRIBLE for the economy and even worse for the average American.
You want progressive policies, like better education, housing for the homeless, social safety nets, job training, etc? Those are all left-wing goals.
Are you over the age of 60? or just daft. Every dollar we spend in Ukraine is a dollar wasted on a county whose biggest export is prostitutes' and whose officials have shown multiple times that they are corrupt and pocket the money for G-wagons and Private Yachts. What evidence do you have that we will eventually fight Russia? In the 90's when the soviet union fell they wanted to join NATO, they were laughed out of the room. Their whole issue has been the expansion of NATO to their borders over the course of the past 30 years. The original agreement was that they would never expand past the 1991 borders. Russia, outside of nuclear weapons, posses no physical threat to the United States, if Europe is THAT worried about Russia they should fund their own defense instead of relying on daddy America everytime something scary happens. All we are doing at this point, is letting an ENTIRE generation of Ukrainian and Russian men & women die over something that they have both attempted to have peace negotiations over that keep getting blocked by the united states.
Joe Biden hasn't done shit, Within a week of him getting elected gas prices shot up almost $2 overnight, We've lost respect on the world stage, there has been wave after wave of layoffs, and inflation is still rising rapidly. That "oh we have it under control at 3%" means its rising at 3% month over month, not that its steady at 3%.
"Oo R u A cHiLd Or a RePuBliCan i CnT TeLl" I'm neither, but you democrats have your head so far up your ass that you refuse to admit when your political party is just as bad but paying lip service. Your side kicked out Bernie and Andrew, the only two people that would have brought any change for a senile old man, and a VP whose the biggest hypocrite and sack of shit on the west coast. Now your planning to run him AGAIN, or a California man that uses too much hair gel and destroyed a once beautiful state with vitrue signaling politics.
I want progressive policies, but not the bullshit that the mainline democrats keep pushing.
I don’t like to engage in political debates on Reddit or anywhere for that matter but this post is so ridiculously stupid.
We’re not going to engage in an actual war with Russia. There’s absolutely no indication of that whatsoever and you neglect to mention that the only reason why there’s ANY tension between them and Ukraine is because we basically sponsored a coup there in 2014 to overthrow a duly elected government and the situation has been cascading ever since. The presidents name was Viktor Yanukovych if you don’t recall and it was very much a coup, not an election that overthrew him.
After that, the eastern regions voted to be reabsorbed by Russia and we and the rest of NATO declared those elections to be illegal, which is just hilarious on its face. Not to say that Putin hasn’t been aggressive, but the context is somewhat important and to say that we didn’t at least aid in the origins of this conflict is just a lie. We did, and anybody who says otherwise wasn’t paying attention in 2014.
I will give it to Jerome Powell, he’s done a hell of a job keeping us out of a recession. But the entire situation was avoidable if the DNC wasn’t so hell bent on shutting down the economy. You can blame Trump, and he deserves a portion of it, but look at the response in FL vs CA and don’t be a fucking liar about it. Lockdowns were not popular amongst conservatives and they’ve been proven ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst.
And as far as policies that work for Americans, I seem to recall HRC restating her endorsement of NAFTA (which her husband passed) initially in the run up to the 2016 election before she pivoted because it was such an anti-American worker position to take. I also recall Trump running on a platform of opposing multi-lateral trade deals, as they have wreaked havoc on US manufacturing, being explicitly pro-union and raising tariffs against China, all while refusing to slash entitlement programs. Say what you want about him, but he took some positions that no other mainstream politician was taking and he’s shifted the conversation in many ways he doesn’t get credit for.
Democrats have become so pro-war and anti-middle class that they’d make Dick Cheney blush. They actually have you people convinced that allowing unchecked economic migration into the US is a humanitarian issue for fucks sake.
End rant. I won’t engage further, but blindly following either party is what’s gotten us into this fuckin quagmire and it needs to stop.
Didn't the US just hit a record high debt lin 2022? Like $34,000,000,000,000? Even a small fraction of that is quite a lot of money. And not even your own money.
When a country spends 1% of its budget on foreign aid, how can you say foreigners "take priority" over domestic needs?
Also, if you're wondering why America doesn't care about it's poor, talk to the Republican governors. Bastards won't even feed the kids.
[Republican governors in 15 states reject summer food money for kids (msn.com)](https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/republican-governors-in-15-states-reject-summer-food-money-for-kids/ar-AA1mKabW)
Not to mention that foreign aid is rarely dollars being spent and is often supplies and equipment we already have stored and plan to decommission. So basically stuff that was going to waste because we overproduce that kind of thing, which is another issue.
The reality, as others have touched on, is that it's much easier for the US government to throw money towards a foreign power to buy soft power/curry political favor, than it is to put that money into local public works programs that would help poor/homeless people. Just look at how many Republican states turned away child lunch funding, or refused ACA expansion. Or how few states/cities (both Dem and Rep run) are interested in just housing the homeless, or running any sort of public housing. It, at best, tends to get filtered through programs like Section 8, and those things tend to have large wait times, and a lot of restrictions. As well as bring their own levels of discrimination.
Handing a foreign country money from Defense spending to maintain some kind of diplomatic favoritism is just far easier than getting anyone within the country to work together, especially when one party runs on a platform post-Reagan that specifically hates the government doing anything useful that isn't filtered through some private interests hands first. It's tough to get a lot done when one half of your political parties doesn't want to help it's own homeless and suffering people.
Well said, u/archiotterpup. Well said.
Americans no longer think they need each other, so we've morphed into a society of absolute individualists. How sad, and how wrong we are.
Late stage capitalism is awful and still probably one of the better outcomes over the other types of economic systems. You know what I'm starting to just think life sucks
Yeah, except we have good evidence that democratic socialist systems have the potential to function far more effectively when the leaders aren't assassinated by foreign countries (the US) or when foreign countries (the US) don't fund, arm, train, and support right-wing coups.
The USSR had its negative qualities, but not every socialist system has to approximate the USSR, and numerous examples from South America demonstrated the ability to significantly increase quality of life on very reasonable budgets.
I don’t know if I’d use South America as an example of democratic socialism working well. If anything the Nordic example is better but it requires strong community support which is severely lacking in South America. The wealthy in South America are not interested the kind of taxation seen in Northern European countries.
There have been numerous strong, well-supported, popular, democratic socialist movements in South America, they just usually haven't lasted more than a handful of years at most before US intervention put an end to them.
Nordic models are still inherently strongly capitalist, and was specifically formulated as a way to temporarily pacify workers to prevent socialist revolution. Over the past few years, even they have gradually begun to institute austerity measures.
If authentic power is not in the hands of communities, inevitably the rich will continue to strive towards varieties of feudalism.
Foreign aid ensures that countries are friendly to the US and often comes with many strings attached like cooperating with US businesses or implementing pro-US policies. It is in the interest of American capitalists to use foreign aid to make markets as profitable as possible. This is not true for homelessness, which is a useful tool to coerce people into working shitty jobs for low pay under threat of losing a roof over their heads.
Pretty much every country in the west has a myriad of institutions, NGOs, programs, etc. to help local homeless people. Just because the media doesn't always focus on local problems doesn't mean governments and people in general aren't actively helping those in need locally.
Yeah but the US has more homeless people numerically and per capita than any other Western nation by a lot so something is not working, especially when compared with the defense budget that routinely misplaces billions of dollars inexplicably and has never passed an audit, ever.
It's because capitalism is so overly ingrained in your collective frame of mind that really helping people looks too much like socialism to which that same hive mind is allergic.
Decades of education cuts and tiktok is progress
Why would they jeopardize the progress by helping people?
Capitalism requires slavery and bootlicking as well as a complacent population of workers to be exploited.
This is basically the correct answer, but no one recognizes this. And Medicaid is a just a portion of over all assistance spending. In truth we should do MUCH more to help people, but foreign aid isn’t gonna make a blip in the costs of doing things like universal healthcare, universal housing, universal childcare, etc.
Lots of conspiracy theories here but the truth is simpler and more boring, as truth tends to be: we don't know how to end homelessness in a way which has majority support.
I'm not actually sure there is majority support for ending homelessness in the first place rather than support for homelessness magically ending itself. Likewise, I don't know if there is a known way to end homelessness, majority support or no.
It’s not altruistic help, we intervene according to our national interests. We help Israel and Ukraine because we think it benefits us. We don’t give a shit what happens to people in Sudan or Myanmar. Also, if we give someone money, they kinda have to do what we say.
homeless people exist for a reason, to make sure everyone else works extra hard and doesn't complain spending 70% of their income on rent.
if we just gave out free housing every minimum wage worker would be in line right next to the homeless
Foreign aid stops wars, full stop. Anyone who paid attention in history class will realize that suffering leads to instability, which leads to wars, and wars rarely stay contained within their original borders.
Your sentiment is understandable, solve the problems here first, but by comparison our poor and homeless actually live quite well compared to their counterparts around the world. You can also solve a lot more misery for less money when people are in much greater desperation in other countries. You can feed hundreds of starving people in impoverished countries for the cost of housing a single individual in the US.
Finally, as others have mentioned, most of our foreign aid is not sent in the form of cash. Most of it goes in the form of equipment being sent to foreign countries, specifically ones we want to strengthen their governments. During the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s we supported non-communist governments to prevent the spread of communism. The two greatest recipients of foreign aide back when I was college in the early 2000’s were Israel and Egypt, because we wanted to stabilize friendly governments in the Middle East. Pakistani gets a lot of aid because they are a nuclear national and we don’t want instability leading to radical Islamist jihadists to gain control of nukes of the relatively secular government.
The world is a MUCH safer place with the paltry amount of foreign aid than it would be with us putting that money into programs here.
Foreign aid also destabilizes foreign economies, props up warlike and dictatorial regimes, and (when it does work) swells populations beyond what the land and labor markets can sustain. It’s not at all as easy as saying “this saves lives, and therefore prevents wars.”
In some cases this is absolutely true. Egypt, for example, is a tenuous ally that is critical because of the Suez canal. Jordan is another one like this for different reasons. The Dept of Defense is the second largest source of US foreign aid, and it's worth it because it's cheaper than the alternatives.
If we could send Iran three billion a year and be friends it might save us a trillion dollars over the next five.
The real reason for foreign aid is that it is in the best interest of the US/West. It's a trivial amount of money and that money is used to secure working relationships with other nations that allow the West to maintain hegemony and trade agreements that benefit their own populations. If a country is struggling and the US ignores it then adversaries like China might come in to provide support. That increases their footing in the region and makes other regional players more sympathetic to trading with them or providing them with more favorable conditions like port access, access for foreign investment etc.
That is then completely disconnected from why countries like America dont help their own populations. The reason for that is largely down to Republicans who are ideologically opposed to the government helping or providing services for its citizens. They're literally trying to stop the Democrats from feeding school children for example.
It's complicated. Brownie points for politicians, but also for the country as a whole on the world stage. Making friends overseas, or perhaps more importantly, making sure your enemies *don't* make friends.
Also giving country X money means invading country Y blows the hell out of them instead of someone/something you actually care about.
So glad you could so arrogantly assume anything about how I vote based off a single innocuous reddit post. You have incredible critical thinking skills 🙄
keeping some people desperate is an effective deterrent to workers that do make enough money to live a good life without assistance to not complain. It also gives them someone to look down on and feel self righteous. effective motivational tool
There is actually a strong ethical case to favor foreign aid over domestic aid.
I can recommend Peter Singer's book The Most Good You Can Do, fantastic read.
The point is to maximize wellbeing for as many people as possible. With this in mind $100 in aid goes WAY further in a developing country than in a first world country.
US government decisions have nothing to do with this though, as others pointed out.
At what point would American citizens be doing well enough that we could consider helping others?
The answer is that it would never happen. Every argument I've heard centered around "America First" is really just "American Only". It's just an excuse to ignore other people.
>I can’t see an ethical argument in favour of foreign aid while a non zero number of natives in your country are also suffering and in poverty.
That's because there isn't one lol. Governments don't have their constituents' best interests at heart. If they did, they would lose power/global domination. Keep moving left and you'll see all kinds of evidence of this (for sure in the US, idk about all others)
hint: follow money. that's always what it's about
Foreign aid is how the rich men north of Richmond stay rich , they send money then in return they get money put back into their re-election campaigns . How is it most people in congress go in with nothing or never worked anything but as a public servant and are worth 10s of Millions
Because the wealthy and powerful don’t want that. It would mean bettering society and the powerful don’t want that so they can maintain control. The founding fathers always believed in protecting the opulent of the minority from the majority
You know foreign aid includes building infrastructure in other countries that will allow for trusted trade. Movement of production creates wealth for both countries.
If we stopped all foreign aid in both USA and Canada and focused on our own countries problems such as poverty do you truly think that would 'solve' homelessness and poverty? Money isn't the solution. It's a systematic issue. Throw a trillion dollars at it.. we will be back to where we are in a few years. Then there's the whole unsaid war of drugs between China and North America (fentanyl) and China is doing one hell of a good job.
Then again, people are all about quick fixes and band aids rather then addressing the real issue. Look at mental health with a focus on anxiety/depression.
This is called a false dichotomy. You frame it as though the only two options are foreign aid OR caring for the homeless. This then implies the reason we aren’t caring for the homeless is foreign aid.
The reality is we could afford to do both, if we wished. Maybe the question you should ask is why/if we don’t care for our homeless in the US.
They genuinely do not, is the answer. They don't, that's false, you are "begging the question" as they say in debate class.
The US government spends about as much on healthcare and social services as it does on the military, somewhere around a trillion dollars. It varies from year to year. It spends about 50 billion in foreign aid, likewise varying. That's 5% as much.
Most other "Western" countries spend a much *larger* proportion of their budget on healthcare and social services, and less on military, and a very similar one on foreign aid.
That's all there is to it- these numbers are a matter of public record. The answer to your question is, "they do not."
Multiple reasons.
1. It’s not really “help” given to other countries. In fact, it’s often just total destruction and oppression. At best, it’s control.
2. The west depends on having their own underclasses to keep their own economies going
If the US were to stop doing foreign aid, not one penny of it would go into domestic spending.
Yeah the issue isn’t that we’re allocating money for our citizens to foreign aid. We have the money to do both. But a huge portion of citizens don’t want their taxes going towards helping their fellow citizens.
Yeah that's communism! I want my taxes to go to rich people!
How do your taxes go to rich people?
Subsidies, government contracts, stuff like that.
Oh that create jobs for not rich people? Hmmm mental gymnastics
Sounds like you’re the one doing backflips
Go google trickle down economics and see how many economists agree with you here
We are being trickled on all right but not how this person thinks.
Yea, but I saw this YouTube video...
You think rich people are rich because of their jobs? 😂
You know nothing about the economy obviously fucking idiot
Didnt know Ronald Reagan was on reddit
So, when the government pays for food and rent subsidies and the money goes to corporate grocery stores and landlords....
Yeah I mean, idk what point you’re really trying to make. Don’t help the poor because rich people benefit?
[удалено]
No... this is a mischaracterization. People don't trust their government with higher taxes because they know their government is misallocating the money it already has. I would happily pay more in taxes if the 30% I do pay actually was spent wisely. Instead we have massively wasteful organizations like the pentagon that just "lose" money. Instead we have corrupt politicians whose children spend tax payer dollars on cocaine and hookers.
Then step up. It’s not “they the politicians,” it’s “we the people”. Get involved in a local good government organization, visit your Congressperson, get to know your city council member. Even when I disagree with them, I recognize that most politicians are civic-minded people who want to do public service. Being like “all politicians are stealing from the public coffers” completely misunderstand how even corruption works: usually the take bribes from companies or misuse donor funds. You aren’t just cynical, you’re utterly ignorant about how corruption actually works. Do you think Hunter Biden was buying coke with Obamacare bucks or something? Grow the hell up.
I didn't say all were. But I agree with your general statement. In general it's the career politicians. Should be term limits and addtl controls of members of congress to prevent insider trading and such. Congress needs more everyday people and less career politicians. Hunter spent like $800,000 on hookers and coke, and he didn't get that from selling paintings. He's the presidents son for Christ sake. Of course he gets cash from Biden. You're not on coke right now, are you?
Yes, there are more forms of corruption that bribery and embezzlement is clearly one of them. Hunter Biden joined the Navy Reserve in his mid-thirties and was pinned Ensign by his VP dad in the White House itself. He attended his first drill and popped hot for cocaine. Yes, shit like that absolutely costs taxpayer dollars.
What we know actually happens is if taxes go up then Washington bureaucrats take more of it. Nothing really changes, but the tax increase won't go away
What money? Aren't we 33 trillion in debt? Why can't we have officials who manage to spend less by compromising with the right by saying ok we gonna spend this on our citizens instead? If they demonize that as the evil socialism then ask them what the heck the current situation is
"You need to help that family." "I'm trying to take care of my own family." "But who's going to help that family?" "Themselves! Just like my family. If you take from my family to help that family, there won't be enough left for my family." "Don't worry. We'll make someone help your family."
If you ignore the fact that we are $34T in debt.
>helping their fellow citizens. Because the majority of people who end up homeless end up homeless because of drugs. No one gets addicted to drugs by accident. It's always their decision to try some despite being told to stay away by literally everyone. That's a decision they made and there is no reason why I should jave to pay for that mistake when I have plenty of places I need to spend my own money to take care of my family members and friends who actually deserve the money. Also the cost of housing feeding and Healthcare for someone is extremely high and why the fu k should the rest of us who are struggling to get enough for ourselves slave away so that deadbeat losers can live for free? Sorry to those who actually had bad luck, but most of them manage to get back on their feet eventually anyway. Some people in Manhattan have been living 100% rent free in government housing for decades without anything to show for it. After all why should they try to move out when people making 150k a year can't even afford to live the way they do? Just sit back relax and live like a wealthy tycoon and have the taxpayers pick up the bull forever.
Actually, the research shows that most people who become homeless land there for financial or other regular reasons. They then become drug addicts after becoming homeless because of the situation. The cycle then just continues down.
100% of homeless people are homeless because they don’t have a home. I wonder if the solution is something related to that… 🤔
Just going to ignore all the drug addicts who got addicted due to a prescription?
Of course. If bad things happen to people it must be their own fault. Otherwise misfortune could happen to me.
Prescription drugs are one thing but if youre on the streets addicted to meth that's a you problem, stop trying to make it a me problem instead
Do you think people who get addicted to prescription drugs never end up on the streets addicted to different, yet very similar, drugs? At what point in their addiction do you stop thinking of them as a human?
If by, no one gets addicted by accident, you mean no one is prescribed painkillers after a major accident and becomes addicted to doctor prescribed medications meant to alleviate a legitimate medical issue, you are incorrect. It is the source of addiction far too commonly in many of the child protection cases I deal with daily.
You would prefer to throw billions at other countries, or give everything to illegals who came here to live off you.
It's easier to hide the money laundering with foreign countries rather than domestic ones.
There is a LOT of ignorance about how much counties, like the US, spend on foreign aid. It’s a fraction of one percent. The only aid that is more than that is military aid, and that’s less “helping people” than supporting American foreign policy interests. People routinely vastly overestimate how much aid money there is.
That second part is the important part. The US government - in fact, NO government - just gives tens of millions of dollars to foreign countries out of pure altruism. They're buying behavior that is in Americans' interest. Look at one of the most iconic examples of US foreign aid, the Marshall Plan. We gave $13 billion dollars (equivalent to $170 billion in today's money) to Western European countries after WWII, and in return we got eager trade partners and stable, strong allies against the Soviet Union. Security aid to East Asia buys trade partners. Food aid to Africa fights terrorism. Military aid to Ukraine defangs one of our major geopolitical competitors without putting a single American soldier in harm's way. You can take issue with what exactly we're buying with foreign aid, but we don't give anything away for free.
Sending billions to Ukraine while Maui burned was pretty sus.
How much did we spend on disaster aid when we weren’t supporting Ukraine? Seems like the numbers are unrelated, and that maybe you oppose aid for Ukraine for other reasons but are being dishonest about what those are.
I’m sure they really could have used the precision munitions and armored vehicles in Hawaii
Did anyone try blowing up the volcano? No? So there were other options left unexplored while people's homes burned down, smh...
something tells me that mightve done more harm than good
Billions? Billions of artillery shells, bombs, etc.? You and Trump think we can bomb the wildfires and hurricanes but that's not how it works...
Trump? You are weird buddy. $75billion in assistance including MONEY.
Money in high interest loans is a small fraction of any aid given to Ukraine. The majority is old weapons that is sitting unused. You are uninformed buddy.
We are not merely providing outdated weaponry. A friend of mine still serving in the Marine Corps told me they have a shortage of artillery shells, hindering their intended training sessions. Live fire training has been significantly reduced due to the reason of how much we gave to Ukraine.
Ya just a small fraction of 75 BILLION.
It's called "soft power". You believe the generals, politicians, and everyone else involved is doing it to be nice? So innocent lol...
It’s very clear they are not nice and have no interest in helping anyone besides their pockets.
I’m just not pro war like you.
Sending weapons to a country so they can defend themselves against a hostile invasion is being pro-war?
Yeah that America First isolationism nonsense really worked so well for us in the 1930's.
seems like you are, not supporting ukraine just means a full war in Europe in a few years
It’s a little odd you’re more interested in the affairs of a country who broke their NATO promise than the already oppressed people of Maui.
Which country broke their NATO promise? Ukraine isn't a NATO member.
75 was the start, it's up to over 150 billion now. Meanwhile, our border is wide open and our streets are filled with homeless people. Do you think 150 billion dollars could "solve" the homeless problem? I sure do. They could give a million dollars to each homeless person in the country. LOL. Leftists are too blind to see the truth.
Our border is not and never has been wide open. Look I get it you're special and you need the visual aide of a useless fence or border wall but even without those visual aides we are not wide open. If we were wide open we would be getting a fuck ton more illegals than we currently get. >Leftists are too blind to see the truth. Wtf do you think the right is going to do? They aren't going to use shit of that money for anything social cause that would be a handout or gasp "communism" (it's actually would be socialism but dumb fucks on the right don't know the difference). That money would go to their pockets or the pockets of the rich. None of it would go anywhere it's needed. And the "trickle down" part will never trickle down cause those companies and billionaires aren't obligated to trickle it down. It will go right into theor personal wallets or their companies wallets. And none of that would go to where it's needed. No pay raises. Nothing of the sorta. A bit of the money would get donated but that's for tax purposes. So companies can keep more of the money. You are too blind to see the truth.
It is not wide open? Over 300,000 people walked across it illegally last month. Over 5 million since 2020. If that is not wide open I don't know what is.
No it isn't. You understand nothing about anything. Get off your fox news bullshit and actually read about how we conduct our borders. I get it, it's "work" to read up on this but it's fascinating when you actually understand. Our borders are not wide open. And the parts where it had a wall or a fence, guess what? They just climb over it with rope and a ladder. It's not fucking hard to get over them. Borders walls and fences are useless garbage that fucks up the ecosystems and ecology in the area.
Are you denying that 300,000 people entered the country illegally last month and over 5 million people have entered the country illegally since 2020? These are numbers straight from the DHS. Are you saying they are lying?
Most of the money for Ukraine was given to American weapons manufacturers who then sent the equipment to Ukraine. In other words, very little of the aid for Ukraine actually gets spent in Ukraine.
Maui got aid immediately. Biden approved Gov. Green's request for a federal disaster declaration on August 10, while the fire was still burning. No delay.
$200 million cash to Kyiv and $700 per household to Maui. Ask the locals what they think of his aid or lack thereof.
No, we're not sending cash to Ukraine. We're sending old military equipment that is no longer what the US military currently uses. We started with stuff old enough that it was otherwise slated to be destroyed--which would have cost us money. We've been moving upward through more current equipment, but still not what we're currently using. Even when we do "give money" to other countries, it's nearly all conditional on it being spent to buy what they need *from the US.* The $700 initial cash relief per household from FEMA is a drop in the bucket of the federal aid money being spent in Hawaii.
Israel for example receives 3 Billion a year is military aid, which is basically a discount coupon for US weapons. New York Police department has a budget of about 6 Billion, We pay because we need safe passage of ships through the suez, and to prevent the region to spilling over in war, that is why after Israel, Egypt is a close ally. We save far more by paying the 5 billion every year, than say have inflation of 10%
So many don’t understand this. You do . Thank you for posting
I’m not very political or even tapped into it but i’ve seen something that the US has sent over $50 billion to Ukraine (google says $75 billion) and it would only take about $20 billion to end homelessness
It's 50 billion in value, not hard cash. If we send them, say, 50 tanks that were made in the 80's and value them at 200 million, we sent them 200 million in tanks, but not 200 million cash. We do this so we can bill them later if they win, AND when we do give them money we say, "Alright, here's 400 million dollars, but you HAVE to spend buying HIMARS rockets." Who makes HIMARS rockets? Well, we do of course. So it just goes right back into our economy. So it's not a total net loss.
Ohh that’s kinda fye so it’s like an investment kinda
Yes, and this is true of a lot of the aid that the US gives to other countries. It's often either goods produced in the US or else money that must be spent to buy goods produced in the US.
Much of what we've sent to Ukraine has actually saved us money. The Javelin and stinger missiles weren't too far from being old enough that they were going to be destroyed, which costs money. We don't really use stinger missiles much because we bring Air superiority with us wherever we send troops.
Not only saved us money, but saved us lives. The US hasn’t sent any active military and Russia has lost a lot of troops to our weapons.
Diplomacy is definitely an investment (and always existed, we kinda want out neighbours and allies on the same wavelength, foreign aid helps that, it also helps ensure similar treatment if your country is in trouble too. They are transactional by nature).
Well... It's not an "investment" in that Ukraine is going to pay us back; that part is just wrong 😐. Most of the assistance is straight up military aid (ie donations) and much of the "loans" are posturing to fiscal conservatives who don't understand foreign policy - the majority of those "loans" will be quietly forgiven later on. It absolutely **is** an investment in that having a stable and democratic government in Ukraine helps European / NATO security enormously. If the US allows Russia to steamroll Ukraine (which conservatives are quietly pushing for, for... reasons.) It's not like it will be *cheap* for NATO to maintain an extended front against Russia, and/or to re-take Ukraine (either in terms of material, and also lives). It's absolutely "a stitch in time saves nine" situation. Additionally, when the US announces an aid package, a lot of that cost is recouped in different ways - people have mentioned sending old and soon-to-expire equipment, while allocating the money to order replacements. Much of that work happens in the US, and so that money gets paid to US companies and workers, who then turn around and pay US taxes. Plus it's money that would have to be spent *anyway* to replace expired equipment / ordinance, and you safe on disposal costs, etc. If you look even further out, there are real advantages in keeping domestic arms manufacturing in business also, in terms of encouraging them to maintain / expand production lines, R&D, etc. Anyway, the point is it doesn't actually "cost" us zero dollars to support Ukraine... But a "200 million" aid package isn't really costing 200 million either. Exactly how much it "costs" in the end depends on a huge number of assumptions and some complex economic calculations, but it's absolutely *not* 200million. More importantly though, it would take *trillions* of dollars to re-stabilize the region after a Russian annexation, if that's even logistically possible at all. (Remember that Russia is a nuclear state, so... Direct conflict with Russia isn't ideal 😅).
It's nice that we finally started investing somewhere other than Afghanistan. By the way, how did that turn out anyway?
The money spent helping Ukraine is a super cheap way to keep Russia's army weak, thus increasing our security. It's a bargain. Abandoning Ukraine is playing into Putin's plans. I don't know why some politicians like Russia more than America.
I know right? Just like we did with that evil Taliban!
Also it doesn’t take 20 billion dollars to end homelessness, seriously, the reasons why people are homeless don’t suddenly go away once people have homes. You could build slums for everybody to “have a home” but that would not necessarily improve most people situation. Drug addiction being the biggest thing, you could give a drug addict a mansion and a stable job, and the chances that they beat it is EXTREMELY low. Wanna know why you hear tons of stories about celebrities and rich people who fell off and OD? But you don’t hear many stories about drug addicts that become celebrities.
Giving away old military equipment can benefit US as well. Because old stuff we don't currently use still need to be maintained and eventually destroyed, which all cost money. It's a great way to save money in the future while improving relation with a country that can further out interest.
But why not give tanks to the homeless first??? /s
Because helping the homeless is a tankless job.
We’ve sent at minimum 26B in financial assistance, dated from Jan 2022-2023. Yes, the majority of aid has been military, but to say we’re not supplying financial support is false. https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-us-aid-ukraine-money-equipment-714688682747
that's because of the way that number is calculated - the US isn't "sending money" to ukraine in any meaningful amounts. The US is LOANING money to ukraine at relatively high interest rates The US is giving billions of dollars "worth of military goods" - but what that actually means is that 10 years ago the US spent an (inflation adjusted) billion dollars making a million rounds of rifle ammo and 100,000 rifles, and those rifles and ammo are both obsolete so we're SELLING them to ukraine to use to fight russia, so that we don't need to send our own populous to go fight russia instead. The actual cost of this is just shipping cost - if we weren't giving it to ukraine it would be getting thrown away or sitting in an old warehouse gathering dust - and that shipping cost is almost certainly less than the amount we're charging ukraine for the goods. This is also why that number has so much variability, because the value is being estimated and inflation adjusted from initial manufacturing and development costs, instead of being the actual sale-price. \~\~\~\~\~\~\~ so while you can look at every the US is giving ukraine and total it's value to multi-billions of dollars, the OPPORTUNITY COST of the aid - or the money that is going to ukraine that could have gone to US citizens instead - is maybe a few tens of millions of dollars, which is maybe 1-2% of the annual domestic welfare budget; and the US is expecting to get most of that back in interest payments for loans. It's actually likely that all told the US will GAIN money from "sending aid" to ukraine. Just like the US government came out of the 2008 bailout LOANS with a multi-billion dollar profit after all the loans were paid back with interest and all the company shares the government bought were resold for profits.
I believe some of this. One corroborating point is when the military was running low on funds to pay for arms in their budget they "found" a bunch of money by devaluing the arms previously sent to Ukraine. And that money mostly goes to U.S. arms suppliers, so the U.S. is actually borrowing money and giving it to Lockheed and the rest.
I didn't even particularly want to get deeper into the economics in this space, but yes almost all of the money being "sent" is being spent on domestic manufacturing and thereby the US is giving itself money for most of this.
Ahh okay that makes sense
So, the short answer is the US spends way too much money on military stuff instead of helping their own people, and then turns around and sells the over abundance of equipment to other countries for an imaginary number that no country can ever pay down?
You seem to think that without military stuff, everybody would play nice and other countries would not invade, curtail American interests, and start wars.
You seem to be insinuating that if we did not help strengthen our allies, that our enemies would not invade them because they are weak... Is that the insinuation? That if a place like Russia sees a country that's not able to defend itself it won't invade? Why? Because it won't be a "challenge"?
Please reread. I'm saying: Without the US spending on military stuff, does he expect other countries to play nice, not invade countries and start wars?
Aaaah yeah okay, sorry I misread you. You weren't stating that YOU thought that you were asking if THEY thought that lol basically asking them the same thing I asked you 🤣 my bad
Except we're also sending cash. Also, some of those weapons turned up in Mexican cartels. ... That's certainly a check someone will have to pay
There’s always portion of what the us makes in weapons getting stolen and ends up in someone else’s hands
There 40 millions poor in the USA. 20 Billion, is giving once 500$ to each of them once. That is not much and will not achieve anything big. Basically a few month later, the situation is back to square 1. Nothing changed.
That's true if you do the lazy method of handing them all cash. Instead what you do is set up programs to help solve the issues that are causing homelessness, like drug addiction and lack of readily and affordable access to mental health services. Even if we had the money to hand them all 100k each, without those services, a large portion of them would end up right back on the streets within a year or two.
If we are being honest, a large portion will be on the streets again regardless of amount provided. You can get people into rehab but you can't keep them sober. Less than 1% of people with alcoholism or addiction issues will ever get sober.
You honestly think there are no programs set up now to help homeless people?
A significant amount of the aid packages have been training and military equipment. US gives older munitions, vehicles, equipment, etc. to Ukraine and then buys new stuff for its own troops. This new material they buy is then bought through or from US companies. So much of the money spent staying in circulation within America kinda. Of the financial support directly to Ukraine, it's a mix of money, grants, and loans.
I’m from San Francisco, have done work with some great groups fighting homelessness here, but even I am very skeptical that spending more money to fight homelessness will solve the problem automatically. There are a lot of contradictory policies and cultural issues the U.S. would have to confront to significantly reduce homelessness. Just my opinion though.
I read the link you shared, and I believe it's $20 billion per year. Not a one-time $20 billion expenditure. But that is a price that our country could absolutely afford, and even afford while also doubling what we've given to Ukraine. It hasn't happened because Congress hasn't chosen to fund it. Not because we are sending "that money" somewhere else.
Isn't that a theoretical amount based on perfect spending/output? Vs reality like this [https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/18/heres-how-the-federal-government-wastes-tax-money.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/18/heres-how-the-federal-government-wastes-tax-money.html)
Actually it would take a lot more than 20 billion .. sorry to burst your bubble. A lot of cities already spend billions to help homeless. It is the Republicans in Congress that refuse to help the States have a federal response worth a darn.. Making homelessness a Federal issue because it is in every State.
Define "end homelessness."
That is military aid and absolutely a matter of national interest.
"national interest" Destroying enough resources to kick start production and keep us out of recession by giving them a reason to print money
Just like Afghanistan and Vietnam, right?
More like helping Great Britain stop Hitler from invading.
In addition to what everyone else said, Russia is a foreign policy threat to our allies and us, and sending that aid to Ukraine is keeping that threat in check. It’s essentially the same reason why, before Pearl Harbor happened and we entered WWII officially, the US sent tons of aid in the form of weapons and even things like military escorts for trade ships to the UK. Because FDR knew that is the UK fell to Hitler, that was going to be very bad for everyone. Right now, aid to Ukraine is preventing Putin from overrunning it and then turning to Poland and the Baltic states, which are our NATO allies, which would mean Americans would actually be sent there to fight.
Great job. Over 100,000 dead Ukrainian men since the start of the war instead of maybe trying to negotiate a cease fire. That's what I call a catastrophe. Maybe our ivy league educated 'superior's' running US foreign policy should be held accountable for their disastrous strategy. Or maybe they are too bloated on the piles of Ukrainian aid money they laundered.
As opposed to Russia just absorbing the country. That’s probably the ceasefire terms you’d like to see. Yeah it is a catastrophe, maybe dictators like Putin shouldn’t go on invading other countries? I think Ukraine would be happy to agree to a ceasefire if Russian troops just went back to their own border.
We will never know, will we? We told them to go straight to war and sentenced tens of thousands of Ukrainian men to their deaths. Our foreign policy "experts" in DC promised Russia would collapse by now. How did that work out? And now they are closer to China than ever. And with China threatening to take Taiwan, a war with Yemen....all amid record debt and dangerously low military recruitment, I can't think of a more brilliant strategic planning from the geniuses in DC. I'm so glad adults are in charge.
There are very good reasons for helping people in other countries. Have you considered that refugees wouldn't leave their homes to come here if they could get their needs met at home? Also, desperate need can lead to radicalization, which can lead to terrorism. And, when there are disasters, countries help each other out; the U.S. often sends less help than do other countries. Homelessness isn't completely up to the government to solve. Landlords need to be encouraged to offer reasonable rates rather than charging top dollar for maximum profit. Employers need to pay a living wage so that workers can afford housing. Company profits have gone up, up, up since the 80s but most didn't pass much of the increase to employees. GREED in the private sectors needs to be addtessed. https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2021/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/424159/pay-gap-between-ceos-and-average-workers-in-world-by-country/
That still doesnt change the fact that its millions and billions of dollars that SHOULD BE INVESTED HERE
ah yes because giving the homeless population our surplus military weaponry is really gonna combat our domestic welfare issues, and we will 100% expect any welfare we give to be repaid with interest in 10-15 years!
It depends who wins.... Step 1: give homeless rockets Step 2: give them elon musk's address Step 3: paperview the results.
The homeless sell the rockets for more drugs. The end.
*ah yes because giving the homeless population our surplus military weaponry is really gonna combat our domestic welfare issues* Not with that attitude it’s not. My own studies lead me to believe at least half the homeless population would turn on each other once fully armed theoretically eliminating 25% of themselves. That means the other 25% left over from the initial bloodbath would be incarcerated. So just by arming the homeless we automatically house 25% while eliminating another 25% which means you’ve cut homelessness in half. Of course there will be some collateral damage but there always is. I wanna put the /s but at the same time I think this could really work.
You're missing the point retard
The money the US is providing to ukraine is a loan that will be repaid. The goods the us is giving Ukraine is surplus military equipment. The homeless can't repay a loan and don't want our 20 year old obsolete military equipment. Learn economics before you complain about economic policy
Yes, the corrupt country currently loosing an entire generation of men and women that has had it industrial base destroyed and will likely take YEARS to recovery is going to pay all the money back on top of getting everyone who fled to come back. I am aware it is a loan. The point has still clearly gone right over your head. You're retarded.
It's a case of spending $50 Billion and 30K Ukrainian lives to stop the Russians now, or spending a $1 Trillion and 30K American soldiers' lives later. Paying Ukraine to fight Russia in place of doing it ourselves is an economic steal. So, it's not a here vs there argument. It would need to be a stop Russia vs social services spending argument.
Then vote for the party that supports public institutions and social programs.
Invest in what? Give examples.
You're thinking like a child... Or a Republican... Honestly, the two are so similar that it's hard to tell. They are sending billions of dollars worth of equipment. Not billions of dollars. Do you want to give a homeless dude an M1 Abrahams tank and a few hundred thousand dollars worth of weapons and ammo? Do you *really* think that's a good idea? We *can't* invest "here" because a certain party (Republicans) doesn't allow us to invest in our own people. Ever. Also, and here's the truth, every penny in aid we send to Ukraine is a US soldier's life that isn't being wasted. Let me be clear, and don't get this twisted, but Russia is *not our friend.* Sooner or later we *will* have to fight Russia. That's inevitable. We can either give Ukraine the tools needed to defend themselves and defeat Russia now, or we can be prepared to do it ourselves when Russia attacks a NATO country, which they *will* do. Every Russian soldier felled and every Russian weapon fired and every piece of Russian material that is destroyed is one less soldier we have to fight, one less missile we have to shoot down, and one less thing we have to destroy. Period. Ukraine has done more for us than you can know. They have stalled the "Great Russian Army" to a stand still. They're weakening our enemies, which strengthens and protects us. You want to reinvest in the US people? Joe Biden has done that. That's why we're in an economic boom and we didn't have a recession. Trump and the Republicans are TERRIBLE for the economy and even worse for the average American. You want progressive policies, like better education, housing for the homeless, social safety nets, job training, etc? Those are all left-wing goals.
Are you over the age of 60? or just daft. Every dollar we spend in Ukraine is a dollar wasted on a county whose biggest export is prostitutes' and whose officials have shown multiple times that they are corrupt and pocket the money for G-wagons and Private Yachts. What evidence do you have that we will eventually fight Russia? In the 90's when the soviet union fell they wanted to join NATO, they were laughed out of the room. Their whole issue has been the expansion of NATO to their borders over the course of the past 30 years. The original agreement was that they would never expand past the 1991 borders. Russia, outside of nuclear weapons, posses no physical threat to the United States, if Europe is THAT worried about Russia they should fund their own defense instead of relying on daddy America everytime something scary happens. All we are doing at this point, is letting an ENTIRE generation of Ukrainian and Russian men & women die over something that they have both attempted to have peace negotiations over that keep getting blocked by the united states. Joe Biden hasn't done shit, Within a week of him getting elected gas prices shot up almost $2 overnight, We've lost respect on the world stage, there has been wave after wave of layoffs, and inflation is still rising rapidly. That "oh we have it under control at 3%" means its rising at 3% month over month, not that its steady at 3%. "Oo R u A cHiLd Or a RePuBliCan i CnT TeLl" I'm neither, but you democrats have your head so far up your ass that you refuse to admit when your political party is just as bad but paying lip service. Your side kicked out Bernie and Andrew, the only two people that would have brought any change for a senile old man, and a VP whose the biggest hypocrite and sack of shit on the west coast. Now your planning to run him AGAIN, or a California man that uses too much hair gel and destroyed a once beautiful state with vitrue signaling politics. I want progressive policies, but not the bullshit that the mainline democrats keep pushing.
I hear Russia is a nice place to live. America isn't for you.
>That "oh we have it under control at 3%" means its rising at 3% month over month, not that its steady at 3%. No it does not.
I don’t like to engage in political debates on Reddit or anywhere for that matter but this post is so ridiculously stupid. We’re not going to engage in an actual war with Russia. There’s absolutely no indication of that whatsoever and you neglect to mention that the only reason why there’s ANY tension between them and Ukraine is because we basically sponsored a coup there in 2014 to overthrow a duly elected government and the situation has been cascading ever since. The presidents name was Viktor Yanukovych if you don’t recall and it was very much a coup, not an election that overthrew him. After that, the eastern regions voted to be reabsorbed by Russia and we and the rest of NATO declared those elections to be illegal, which is just hilarious on its face. Not to say that Putin hasn’t been aggressive, but the context is somewhat important and to say that we didn’t at least aid in the origins of this conflict is just a lie. We did, and anybody who says otherwise wasn’t paying attention in 2014. I will give it to Jerome Powell, he’s done a hell of a job keeping us out of a recession. But the entire situation was avoidable if the DNC wasn’t so hell bent on shutting down the economy. You can blame Trump, and he deserves a portion of it, but look at the response in FL vs CA and don’t be a fucking liar about it. Lockdowns were not popular amongst conservatives and they’ve been proven ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst. And as far as policies that work for Americans, I seem to recall HRC restating her endorsement of NAFTA (which her husband passed) initially in the run up to the 2016 election before she pivoted because it was such an anti-American worker position to take. I also recall Trump running on a platform of opposing multi-lateral trade deals, as they have wreaked havoc on US manufacturing, being explicitly pro-union and raising tariffs against China, all while refusing to slash entitlement programs. Say what you want about him, but he took some positions that no other mainstream politician was taking and he’s shifted the conversation in many ways he doesn’t get credit for. Democrats have become so pro-war and anti-middle class that they’d make Dick Cheney blush. They actually have you people convinced that allowing unchecked economic migration into the US is a humanitarian issue for fucks sake. End rant. I won’t engage further, but blindly following either party is what’s gotten us into this fuckin quagmire and it needs to stop.
Didn't the US just hit a record high debt lin 2022? Like $34,000,000,000,000? Even a small fraction of that is quite a lot of money. And not even your own money.
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Lobbies and special interests with stake in foreign countries help themselves you mean?
If you’re going to be the world power and global hegemon you have to do world power and global hegemon shit.
When a country spends 1% of its budget on foreign aid, how can you say foreigners "take priority" over domestic needs? Also, if you're wondering why America doesn't care about it's poor, talk to the Republican governors. Bastards won't even feed the kids. [Republican governors in 15 states reject summer food money for kids (msn.com)](https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/republican-governors-in-15-states-reject-summer-food-money-for-kids/ar-AA1mKabW)
Not to mention that foreign aid is rarely dollars being spent and is often supplies and equipment we already have stored and plan to decommission. So basically stuff that was going to waste because we overproduce that kind of thing, which is another issue.
Democraps give illegals free cellphones, healthcare and housing long before they give us any sort of financial help
How did you post this?
Deez nutz
This is the type of intellectual response I’ve come to expect from conservatives.
Yall just mad cause I'm speaking the truth about how illegals are treated better than the blue hair snowflakes that vote for em
Apparently they throw kids out of schools to turn them into migrant housing as well.
The reality, as others have touched on, is that it's much easier for the US government to throw money towards a foreign power to buy soft power/curry political favor, than it is to put that money into local public works programs that would help poor/homeless people. Just look at how many Republican states turned away child lunch funding, or refused ACA expansion. Or how few states/cities (both Dem and Rep run) are interested in just housing the homeless, or running any sort of public housing. It, at best, tends to get filtered through programs like Section 8, and those things tend to have large wait times, and a lot of restrictions. As well as bring their own levels of discrimination. Handing a foreign country money from Defense spending to maintain some kind of diplomatic favoritism is just far easier than getting anyone within the country to work together, especially when one party runs on a platform post-Reagan that specifically hates the government doing anything useful that isn't filtered through some private interests hands first. It's tough to get a lot done when one half of your political parties doesn't want to help it's own homeless and suffering people.
Not to mention our brand of capitalism punishes the poor. There's very little appetite for Americans to help each other.
Well said, u/archiotterpup. Well said. Americans no longer think they need each other, so we've morphed into a society of absolute individualists. How sad, and how wrong we are.
Late stage capitalism is awful and still probably one of the better outcomes over the other types of economic systems. You know what I'm starting to just think life sucks
Yeah, except we have good evidence that democratic socialist systems have the potential to function far more effectively when the leaders aren't assassinated by foreign countries (the US) or when foreign countries (the US) don't fund, arm, train, and support right-wing coups. The USSR had its negative qualities, but not every socialist system has to approximate the USSR, and numerous examples from South America demonstrated the ability to significantly increase quality of life on very reasonable budgets.
I don’t know if I’d use South America as an example of democratic socialism working well. If anything the Nordic example is better but it requires strong community support which is severely lacking in South America. The wealthy in South America are not interested the kind of taxation seen in Northern European countries.
There have been numerous strong, well-supported, popular, democratic socialist movements in South America, they just usually haven't lasted more than a handful of years at most before US intervention put an end to them. Nordic models are still inherently strongly capitalist, and was specifically formulated as a way to temporarily pacify workers to prevent socialist revolution. Over the past few years, even they have gradually begun to institute austerity measures. If authentic power is not in the hands of communities, inevitably the rich will continue to strive towards varieties of feudalism.
those peaky republicans! I saw a photo of what civilization would look like without republicans and there are flying cars
San Francisco is proof of this. Republicans are illegal in San Francisco and they don't have homeless people.
If only your sarcasm were the truth
Foreign aid ensures that countries are friendly to the US and often comes with many strings attached like cooperating with US businesses or implementing pro-US policies. It is in the interest of American capitalists to use foreign aid to make markets as profitable as possible. This is not true for homelessness, which is a useful tool to coerce people into working shitty jobs for low pay under threat of losing a roof over their heads.
Pretty much every country in the west has a myriad of institutions, NGOs, programs, etc. to help local homeless people. Just because the media doesn't always focus on local problems doesn't mean governments and people in general aren't actively helping those in need locally.
Yeah but the US has more homeless people numerically and per capita than any other Western nation by a lot so something is not working, especially when compared with the defense budget that routinely misplaces billions of dollars inexplicably and has never passed an audit, ever.
It's because capitalism is so overly ingrained in your collective frame of mind that really helping people looks too much like socialism to which that same hive mind is allergic.
Decades of education cuts and tiktok is progress Why would they jeopardize the progress by helping people? Capitalism requires slavery and bootlicking as well as a complacent population of workers to be exploited.
The US foreign aid budget was $70 billion in 2022. The Medicaid (health care for poor people) budget was $805 billion.
This is basically the correct answer, but no one recognizes this. And Medicaid is a just a portion of over all assistance spending. In truth we should do MUCH more to help people, but foreign aid isn’t gonna make a blip in the costs of doing things like universal healthcare, universal housing, universal childcare, etc.
Lots of conspiracy theories here but the truth is simpler and more boring, as truth tends to be: we don't know how to end homelessness in a way which has majority support. I'm not actually sure there is majority support for ending homelessness in the first place rather than support for homelessness magically ending itself. Likewise, I don't know if there is a known way to end homelessness, majority support or no.
It’s not altruistic help, we intervene according to our national interests. We help Israel and Ukraine because we think it benefits us. We don’t give a shit what happens to people in Sudan or Myanmar. Also, if we give someone money, they kinda have to do what we say.
homeless people exist for a reason, to make sure everyone else works extra hard and doesn't complain spending 70% of their income on rent. if we just gave out free housing every minimum wage worker would be in line right next to the homeless
Foreign aid stops wars, full stop. Anyone who paid attention in history class will realize that suffering leads to instability, which leads to wars, and wars rarely stay contained within their original borders. Your sentiment is understandable, solve the problems here first, but by comparison our poor and homeless actually live quite well compared to their counterparts around the world. You can also solve a lot more misery for less money when people are in much greater desperation in other countries. You can feed hundreds of starving people in impoverished countries for the cost of housing a single individual in the US. Finally, as others have mentioned, most of our foreign aid is not sent in the form of cash. Most of it goes in the form of equipment being sent to foreign countries, specifically ones we want to strengthen their governments. During the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s we supported non-communist governments to prevent the spread of communism. The two greatest recipients of foreign aide back when I was college in the early 2000’s were Israel and Egypt, because we wanted to stabilize friendly governments in the Middle East. Pakistani gets a lot of aid because they are a nuclear national and we don’t want instability leading to radical Islamist jihadists to gain control of nukes of the relatively secular government. The world is a MUCH safer place with the paltry amount of foreign aid than it would be with us putting that money into programs here.
Foreign aid also destabilizes foreign economies, props up warlike and dictatorial regimes, and (when it does work) swells populations beyond what the land and labor markets can sustain. It’s not at all as easy as saying “this saves lives, and therefore prevents wars.”
American military power is like the cop on the block making sure everybody plays nice
What you're suggesting is isolationism. Isolationism always ends badly. Every. Single. Time.
Foreign countries that the west doesn’t help will be absorbed by Russia / China, and the west will be forced to fight them in World War III.
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In some cases this is absolutely true. Egypt, for example, is a tenuous ally that is critical because of the Suez canal. Jordan is another one like this for different reasons. The Dept of Defense is the second largest source of US foreign aid, and it's worth it because it's cheaper than the alternatives. If we could send Iran three billion a year and be friends it might save us a trillion dollars over the next five.
What do you think has already happened to Belarus?
It’s not charity, it benefits the USA by increasing its power and influence.
The real reason for foreign aid is that it is in the best interest of the US/West. It's a trivial amount of money and that money is used to secure working relationships with other nations that allow the West to maintain hegemony and trade agreements that benefit their own populations. If a country is struggling and the US ignores it then adversaries like China might come in to provide support. That increases their footing in the region and makes other regional players more sympathetic to trading with them or providing them with more favorable conditions like port access, access for foreign investment etc. That is then completely disconnected from why countries like America dont help their own populations. The reason for that is largely down to Republicans who are ideologically opposed to the government helping or providing services for its citizens. They're literally trying to stop the Democrats from feeding school children for example.
The people who are against helping foreigners are the same people who are against helping our own population.
It's complicated. Brownie points for politicians, but also for the country as a whole on the world stage. Making friends overseas, or perhaps more importantly, making sure your enemies *don't* make friends. Also giving country X money means invading country Y blows the hell out of them instead of someone/something you actually care about.
Because people keep voting Republican. That is the sole reason people in our own country aren't being helped.
I ain’t ‘murican, Einstein.
But you vote far right. You're responsible.
So glad you could so arrogantly assume anything about how I vote based off a single innocuous reddit post. You have incredible critical thinking skills 🙄
Sadly, WrongEinstein's reply is representative of way, way too many people in this country. One of the many reasons we can't have nice things.
Because we're not doing it before. It's not a one or the other thing. We spend trillions on welfare, food stamps and the like. We're doing both.
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And on the contrary foreign aid is how to control other nations. The threat of revoking it or having favors owed is powerful
This is an excellent point I didn’t think of
keeping some people desperate is an effective deterrent to workers that do make enough money to live a good life without assistance to not complain. It also gives them someone to look down on and feel self righteous. effective motivational tool
There is actually a strong ethical case to favor foreign aid over domestic aid. I can recommend Peter Singer's book The Most Good You Can Do, fantastic read. The point is to maximize wellbeing for as many people as possible. With this in mind $100 in aid goes WAY further in a developing country than in a first world country. US government decisions have nothing to do with this though, as others pointed out.
At what point would American citizens be doing well enough that we could consider helping others? The answer is that it would never happen. Every argument I've heard centered around "America First" is really just "American Only". It's just an excuse to ignore other people.
Also, some Americans are more equal than others.
Absolutely. No matter how exclusive you make your group, you'll find you can ALWAYS filter out more people.
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Good to know your question wasn't just stupid, but in bad faith.
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oh. oh honey. simple. helping overseas power helps consolidate global US dominance. helping our own doesn’t do that.
>I can’t see an ethical argument in favour of foreign aid while a non zero number of natives in your country are also suffering and in poverty. That's because there isn't one lol. Governments don't have their constituents' best interests at heart. If they did, they would lose power/global domination. Keep moving left and you'll see all kinds of evidence of this (for sure in the US, idk about all others) hint: follow money. that's always what it's about
We want to project power and aid (that you can threaten to withhold) is one way we do it. Also it makes us feel warm and fuzzy.
Foreign aid is how the rich men north of Richmond stay rich , they send money then in return they get money put back into their re-election campaigns . How is it most people in congress go in with nothing or never worked anything but as a public servant and are worth 10s of Millions
Foreign aid is about imperialism and world dominance. Helping people at home just doesn't get you as much
We're not helping them. We're giving them money to buy our weapons.
Because the wealthy and powerful don’t want that. It would mean bettering society and the powerful don’t want that so they can maintain control. The founding fathers always believed in protecting the opulent of the minority from the majority
You know foreign aid includes building infrastructure in other countries that will allow for trusted trade. Movement of production creates wealth for both countries. If we stopped all foreign aid in both USA and Canada and focused on our own countries problems such as poverty do you truly think that would 'solve' homelessness and poverty? Money isn't the solution. It's a systematic issue. Throw a trillion dollars at it.. we will be back to where we are in a few years. Then there's the whole unsaid war of drugs between China and North America (fentanyl) and China is doing one hell of a good job. Then again, people are all about quick fixes and band aids rather then addressing the real issue. Look at mental health with a focus on anxiety/depression.
This is called a false dichotomy. You frame it as though the only two options are foreign aid OR caring for the homeless. This then implies the reason we aren’t caring for the homeless is foreign aid. The reality is we could afford to do both, if we wished. Maybe the question you should ask is why/if we don’t care for our homeless in the US.
They genuinely do not, is the answer. They don't, that's false, you are "begging the question" as they say in debate class. The US government spends about as much on healthcare and social services as it does on the military, somewhere around a trillion dollars. It varies from year to year. It spends about 50 billion in foreign aid, likewise varying. That's 5% as much. Most other "Western" countries spend a much *larger* proportion of their budget on healthcare and social services, and less on military, and a very similar one on foreign aid. That's all there is to it- these numbers are a matter of public record. The answer to your question is, "they do not."
Multiple reasons. 1. It’s not really “help” given to other countries. In fact, it’s often just total destruction and oppression. At best, it’s control. 2. The west depends on having their own underclasses to keep their own economies going