Like Brandon,
I know the point. It’s going to take a while to put biils together. Brandon wiped Trump policies out. Trump came in and wiped Brandon’s out. Either way, my point was they need to codify it and here you are saying it should be codified after his appointments are all in. Wow! That’s like such a huge difference from what I said.
Serving YOUR Country is important to your Country for it and your future !
It's unfortunate that I had to explain how the US governing by political party works.I know the point. It’s going to take a while to put biils together. Brandon wiped Trump policies out. Trump came in and wiped Brandon’s out. Either way, my point was they need to codify it and here you are saying it should be codified after his appointments are all in. Wow! That’s like such a huge difference from what I said.
You didn’t explain anything. The way it usually works is Democrats attack institutions and the Establishment Republicans write letters of protest and the Democrats just keep breaking stuff.
Not hard to believe at all, likely nothing USAID does is what it appears to be. Some of the items may have been in pursuit of things that are important to US interests (someone probably thought they were all important, but I doubt all of those someones hold a vision for the US we would all sign up for). It's just time to stop with the nonsense that USAID is a beacon of altruism shining a warm charitable light throughout the world, and substitute an honest review of what we're trying to achieve and whether we as a nation believe the ends justify the means, or are there better ways to get there from here. And also deal with the pesky question of whether, even if everyone thought it was a great idea in principle, we can afford to pay for it.
Until we have a balanced budget and are shrinking the debt, we should be sending zero or close to zero dollars outside of US borders. The US is the most charitable country in the world. That will all end if we don't fix our own balance sheet.
This seems right to me and there was never any “normie” Republican President who was going to dig in to this.
Yes, I'd agree right now that we're not in a position to be especially charitable. I don't think USAID is in the business of charity much at all. Charity is just the cover story for quid quo pros and manipulating internal politics in other countries. I'm sure that includes some amount of the left pushing leftist agendas, if you believe what the grants' stated purposes are, but I don't think in general those stated purposes tell much, if any at all, of the real intent.
This chart is totally wrong. First, it's from eight years ago. Second, more importantly, it shows the entire defense budget for those countries. Obviously, about all of European countries defense budgets go toward defense of Europe. Only a portion of the US defense budget goes to the defense of Europe.
I understand. The chart may certainly be wrong. As you say. That’s a euro responding with that chart questioning if the NATO alliance as it is should even exist.
The chart is probably correct for the year the data was valid, but you're right the comparison is off if the purpose is to examine NATO funding obligations, though maybe not so much as it might seem given that anyone engaging in international trade is benefiting from the US doing things like keeping shipping lanes open and being ready to mobilize just about anywhere in a crisis. I'm guessing we don't spend all that much that could solely be attributed to defending our territory since we don't have any major enemies in close proximity, save Alaska. The fundamental NATO agreement is to allocate a % of GDP to defense, so that is the chart that would be the most apt comparison, and the US does not look so disproportionate in those terms I'd guess. Maybe moving to a population-based apportion of the defense cost would be better, I dunno.
