The Blue Board

Nm

Oh...okay then.

This entire thread reminded me of this video. Listen very carefully to what he is saying.

And you are okay with that?

If you are working then you don't need food stamps. Get your priorities in order and make the funds work. Quit having kids if you know you can't support them etc

You don't seem to understand the concept that people can be working full time and still not earn enough to support themselves. This isn't a question of people being lazy or squandering their money - until every working person in America makes a living wage, there will be people working full time who still need additional money to merely subsist.

Look at Wal-Mart's business model. They deliberately pay their employees so little that the government is forced into indirectly subsidizing Wal-Mart by providing aid necessary for survival to the employees.

Thats easy for you and me and alot of folks to sit here and say but its not reality. shouldn't the ones working be rewarded or have incentive to stay working. Currently most programs are set up for the person to fail. Why bust your ass 60 hours a week and scrape by when you could quit working and be taken care of. You have to make working a priority and stripping someone of all the help the minute they find a job seems foolish. They need to make the people realize working is a good thing. Right now you could argue its the other way around.

All of these programs have been going on since before we became a superpower or were becoming the only superpower.

So far it has worked. I bet you also wanted to cut space exploration even when it barely made up 1-2% of the governments spending.

Could you expand on this? In many ways, I've viewed foreign aid as the epitome of that old maxim "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Especially when it comes to health and humanitarian aid, it seems like providing basic medical services and attempting to improve quality of life at the outset is better than letting situations deteriorate in foreign countries to the point where any attempt to "fix" the country will be outrageously expensive.

In normal people terms, it's better to supply vaccines and grains to a region instead of intervening later once they start fighting each other over the little resources they have left.

You make valid points. I remember how pissed my Dad was when Clinton gave a few bil to ... whoever it was .. back in the early/mid 90s or so just to prevent a skirmish. I guess this is one of those points that is almost entirely philosophical, and I frankly don't debate politics enough to remember specifics...though I think you'll probably have enough context clues that you will. I also think we may have different perspectives:

First, I wouldn't have advocated going into Afghanistan, clearing the Taliban, and then just leaving. I have no problem helping the displaced/peaceful citizens while we're there, and I understand getting them started on infrastructure so that "undesireables" don't fill the void. However, we've been there before arming and funding groups for our own benefit that turned on us. Didn't we help arm Bin Laden and a few dictators? Either turn the country into glass or make sure you get a ROI for the rebuilding.

Secondly, how much aid do we receive from the rest of the world when bad things happen here? Why does everyone turn to us, and yet make us the villains when it's convenient? Why do we submit to the UN when we do 80% of the work? I don't think we owe the rest of the world some penance for having central Heating/AC.

Finally, I disagree on principle with sending money as a means of soothing situations. It might cost less, but it's basically ransom money. Then you've set the precedent that, if it makes sense financially, we'll pay you to go away.

I know that the world's situations aren't mutually exclusive, but I would much rather just handle our own problems and stay out of the world's messes unless they directly affect us. There are exceptions to any rule, but I wouldn't be sending any flowers to the Chavez family even if it prevented the entire South American continent from sinking.

You're certainly not wrong, but most people are hypocritical about aid. If you truly want to cut aid to focus on America then that's fine, but a lot of people want to cut aid to Africa because their poor mean nothing to us while they're fine with aiding oil rich countries or propping up Israel.

Agree on the UN. It's hard to imagine a more useless body in the world. It accomplishes absolutely nothing, never has, never will, and the General Assembly is fundamentally anti-American and the Security Council is now that China is in, and it blocks most everything we want to do. It's a waste of our money, besides we have embassies and ambassadors for a reason, every-time we actually accomplish anything we do it the old school way through embassy, never through the UN.

Also the UN doesn't have a monopoly on humanitarian aid. Hell the US does more by itself than the damn UN does, and most of what the UN does we are paying for anyway.

Nobody in Israel is starving.