I read something in an AFP article that I found startling.
The Us give 3 billion dollars to the Israeli government every year. That's not counting the 250 million that President Obama just approved.
Now, granted we perceive that Israel is a calming state in the otherwise -- which is debatable. I am no time traveler, I can't tell you what the middle east would look like now, but we do know the millions of Palestinians who were displaced as refugees, and the anger that the Israelis have continually sparked in the region. Yet aside from all that I realized that it told me jsut how distant from our country's spending.
So I looked it up.
Every year we spend a huge portion of our budget on defense ($663 billion). And we spend $25 billion on foreign aid to other countries. $3 billion of that goes just to Israel. That's 8% and change. Of course, we also pay Jordan an undisclosed amount (since 2007) just to leave Israel alone and not harbor its enemies. So really we should add that back in. In 2007 it was $561 million. So Israel is really up to $3.6 billion. I was rounding down before. The next highest recipient is Egypt with $1.75 billion. Together they make up 1/3 of all US "aide" to other countries. The largest cut of the money we give these countries is through the FMF fund which is strictly for military purposes. So, wait, didn't Egypt and Israel fight a war a while back? Yes they did. It's weird that we are giving them both money for weapons. Somehow, that seems counter productive to peace right?
A lot of this money we are throwing at people has to do with our fear of the spread of communism. Which seems like a huge threat now. One communist economy went into total collapse and the other is where everything we own is made (who continually poison themselves so we can have slick i-phone glass). That noted we can say we don't care about communists anymore. So why are we still dolling out this kind of money to these countries to buy weapons in a place where we are trying to get people to be peaceful.
I know what the answer is for those who are in the big stick camp. The only way to make people sit down and shut up is to have a bigger stick than they do. Except that tactic has never worked in the history of mankind. The guy with the stick eventually gets taken out by a bunch of other guys who get together and say, "You know that guy with the stick? We can take him."
I wanted to point out something else as well. We spend $19 billion on education every year. In terms of Percentage of our GDP we rank with Russia. Awesome. And guess who else? Egypt.
So wait, we spend tons of money on defense. Give more money to Egypt for their military weapons, and that frees them up to spend the same amount we do per student? That sounds like some kind of crazy. This kind of comparison might be unfair, but in any budget you can see a countries goals and ideals spelled out in its spending.
Ok so out ahead is Social Security. That's fair since technically that's OUR money the government has been setting aside for us all these years. How nice of them. Next is Defense. I might argue that. I mean, if in the category of "Foriegn Aid" we are handing out money for other countries to buy weapons... I mean. I dunno. Am I crazy? Is it really a good idea to be handing out guns to people?
I get it, we are trying to make them as tronger nation and they are our allie, etc etc. But that is not working out so well. Castro wrote letters to FDR. Saddam Husein was an ally. We named Adolf Hilter as man of the year. Honestly, we aren't good at picking out our friends.
For real. We shouldn't be giving anyone guns with record. They just end up shooting at us. It would be bad enough if the aid we were giving was for food and education, but it's not! The biggest portion of it is designated for military. Sigh. It seems like the defense budget might not need to be so big if we weren't so busy fighting all the people to whom we've been handing out weapons.
Medicare and Medicaid eat up another 20%, more even than the defense budget. The next largest group at 4.6% is the INTEREST on the nation debt. Now, if you own a home you might think, wow, that sounds like a deal. Hook me up with that rate. But, remember, that's not the rate, that's the percent of the GDP that we pay to the interest payment every year. We spend more on that than we do on education, transportation and veterans. Recall also that as of 2010 almost 40% of the debt is help by foreign governments. Another reason it might not be a great idea to be giving these people weapons. When they come to collect they will be well armed. I'm not saying they would win, but it will certainly be worse. In 2011 the debt is $14 trillion dollars. Our 2009 GDP was $14.2 trillion. This looks bad. The debt is 90% of our current GDP, working backwards that makes our current GDP around $16 trillion. The only other time in History that it was higher was after WWII when it hit 120%. So, its not all bad news.
Everything else that the Government does is lumped into the last few percentiles. Agriculture, FDA, Energy Reg, Commerce, Treasury, the National Science Foundation, Health and Human services, Corps of engineers, Justice, and even Homeland security.
Basically everything that you think of "government" doing for a society is a marginal part of what our country actually does. Is it any wonder federal school systems are a mess? That bridges and damns fail? That our energy innovation is stale? That our space program stagnated years ago? That commerce regulation are outdated? That food is fraught with E. Coli? The only thing our government does is have guns, pay for people to be sick and out of work, and... oh. That's it. That's the top percentiles. Everything else (aside from our debt payment) is less than 4%. What the heck!?
The system, my friends, is broken. Yet, somehow in the midst of this, we still send billions over seas to provide weapons to foreign powers who we might just end up fighting someday.
The problem now is the Medicare/Medicaid/Unemployment/Welfare chunk of the pie. That's huge. Huge. And I don't see a way out of it through programs or more spending. The only way people get off the government ticket is through the two things that made the nation a pretty great country in the first place. Freedom and community. When people have the courage and the freedom to care for each other and themselves. They do. When it becomes necessary. The program rewards laziness right now. Especially welfare. I don't dismiss the need for the program, but there have got to be incentives that drive people into each other's arms. Not inside with the television. In fact, that could be rule one. If you are on welfare, you can't have a TV. What would people do!?
In the end, it seems like we as a country are in the habit of paying people for doing nothing. Weather it is here at home, or abroad, we delight in just handing over billions of dollars while no one does anything to compensate us for it. How long can we keep this up? We certainly live in interesting times.
The Us give 3 billion dollars to the Israeli government every year. That's not counting the 250 million that President Obama just approved.
Now, granted we perceive that Israel is a calming state in the otherwise -- which is debatable. I am no time traveler, I can't tell you what the middle east would look like now, but we do know the millions of Palestinians who were displaced as refugees, and the anger that the Israelis have continually sparked in the region. Yet aside from all that I realized that it told me jsut how distant from our country's spending.
So I looked it up.
Every year we spend a huge portion of our budget on defense ($663 billion). And we spend $25 billion on foreign aid to other countries. $3 billion of that goes just to Israel. That's 8% and change. Of course, we also pay Jordan an undisclosed amount (since 2007) just to leave Israel alone and not harbor its enemies. So really we should add that back in. In 2007 it was $561 million. So Israel is really up to $3.6 billion. I was rounding down before. The next highest recipient is Egypt with $1.75 billion. Together they make up 1/3 of all US "aide" to other countries. The largest cut of the money we give these countries is through the FMF fund which is strictly for military purposes. So, wait, didn't Egypt and Israel fight a war a while back? Yes they did. It's weird that we are giving them both money for weapons. Somehow, that seems counter productive to peace right?
A lot of this money we are throwing at people has to do with our fear of the spread of communism. Which seems like a huge threat now. One communist economy went into total collapse and the other is where everything we own is made (who continually poison themselves so we can have slick i-phone glass). That noted we can say we don't care about communists anymore. So why are we still dolling out this kind of money to these countries to buy weapons in a place where we are trying to get people to be peaceful.
I know what the answer is for those who are in the big stick camp. The only way to make people sit down and shut up is to have a bigger stick than they do. Except that tactic has never worked in the history of mankind. The guy with the stick eventually gets taken out by a bunch of other guys who get together and say, "You know that guy with the stick? We can take him."
I wanted to point out something else as well. We spend $19 billion on education every year. In terms of Percentage of our GDP we rank with Russia. Awesome. And guess who else? Egypt.
So wait, we spend tons of money on defense. Give more money to Egypt for their military weapons, and that frees them up to spend the same amount we do per student? That sounds like some kind of crazy. This kind of comparison might be unfair, but in any budget you can see a countries goals and ideals spelled out in its spending.
Ok so out ahead is Social Security. That's fair since technically that's OUR money the government has been setting aside for us all these years. How nice of them. Next is Defense. I might argue that. I mean, if in the category of "Foriegn Aid" we are handing out money for other countries to buy weapons... I mean. I dunno. Am I crazy? Is it really a good idea to be handing out guns to people?I get it, we are trying to make them as tronger nation and they are our allie, etc etc. But that is not working out so well. Castro wrote letters to FDR. Saddam Husein was an ally. We named Adolf Hilter as man of the year. Honestly, we aren't good at picking out our friends.
For real. We shouldn't be giving anyone guns with record. They just end up shooting at us. It would be bad enough if the aid we were giving was for food and education, but it's not! The biggest portion of it is designated for military. Sigh. It seems like the defense budget might not need to be so big if we weren't so busy fighting all the people to whom we've been handing out weapons.
Medicare and Medicaid eat up another 20%, more even than the defense budget. The next largest group at 4.6% is the INTEREST on the nation debt. Now, if you own a home you might think, wow, that sounds like a deal. Hook me up with that rate. But, remember, that's not the rate, that's the percent of the GDP that we pay to the interest payment every year. We spend more on that than we do on education, transportation and veterans. Recall also that as of 2010 almost 40% of the debt is help by foreign governments. Another reason it might not be a great idea to be giving these people weapons. When they come to collect they will be well armed. I'm not saying they would win, but it will certainly be worse. In 2011 the debt is $14 trillion dollars. Our 2009 GDP was $14.2 trillion. This looks bad. The debt is 90% of our current GDP, working backwards that makes our current GDP around $16 trillion. The only other time in History that it was higher was after WWII when it hit 120%. So, its not all bad news.
Everything else that the Government does is lumped into the last few percentiles. Agriculture, FDA, Energy Reg, Commerce, Treasury, the National Science Foundation, Health and Human services, Corps of engineers, Justice, and even Homeland security.
Basically everything that you think of "government" doing for a society is a marginal part of what our country actually does. Is it any wonder federal school systems are a mess? That bridges and damns fail? That our energy innovation is stale? That our space program stagnated years ago? That commerce regulation are outdated? That food is fraught with E. Coli? The only thing our government does is have guns, pay for people to be sick and out of work, and... oh. That's it. That's the top percentiles. Everything else (aside from our debt payment) is less than 4%. What the heck!?The system, my friends, is broken. Yet, somehow in the midst of this, we still send billions over seas to provide weapons to foreign powers who we might just end up fighting someday.
The problem now is the Medicare/Medicaid/Unemployment/Welfare chunk of the pie. That's huge. Huge. And I don't see a way out of it through programs or more spending. The only way people get off the government ticket is through the two things that made the nation a pretty great country in the first place. Freedom and community. When people have the courage and the freedom to care for each other and themselves. They do. When it becomes necessary. The program rewards laziness right now. Especially welfare. I don't dismiss the need for the program, but there have got to be incentives that drive people into each other's arms. Not inside with the television. In fact, that could be rule one. If you are on welfare, you can't have a TV. What would people do!?
In the end, it seems like we as a country are in the habit of paying people for doing nothing. Weather it is here at home, or abroad, we delight in just handing over billions of dollars while no one does anything to compensate us for it. How long can we keep this up? We certainly live in interesting times.
