Why do we send so much money overseas??

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DrillAndFillHeel

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Moderate Democrat here, I'll be voting for Harris. The hurricane disaster relief money coupled with the widespread inflation we are all dealing with really makes me question why we send so much money overseas for humitarian efforts. We have a lot of needs in our own country that don't get taken care of. What would happen if we scaled back a lot of the money that we send to other countries??
 
DrillAndFillHeel said:
Moderate Democrat here, I'll be voting for Harris. The hurricane disaster relief money coupled with the widespread inflation we are all dealing with really makes me question why we send so much money overseas for humitarian efforts. We have a lot of needs in our own country that don't get taken care of. What would happen if we scaled back a lot of the money that we send to other countries??
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We have plenty of money in this country to take care of our own and others. Maybe if the income gap wasn't so ridiculous we would have less people that need help.
 
DrillAndFillHeel said:
Moderate Democrat here, I'll be voting for Harris. The hurricane disaster relief money coupled with the widespread inflation we are all dealing with really makes me question why we send so much money overseas for humitarian efforts. We have a lot of needs in our own country that don't get taken care of. What would happen if we scaled back a lot of the money that we send to other countries??
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We don’t live in a vacuum. We also historically do very little. Most foreign aid goes to things where American supplies , engineers,steel is required
If we scale back one of our adversaries will step in and gain influence
 
Money is allocated during the budget process by Congress. It’s not a big pie where we are choosing ad hoc how to spend the money.

Currently, around 1% of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. A much larger percentage of the federal budget is spent on direct aid to Americans via SS, Medicare, and Medicaid. Not to mention to massive amounts of money spent on our military.

If Republicans in Congress wanted to give more money to FEMA, there wouldn’t be a single Democrat who would vote against that. Either in the budget process or a clean bill. Money going to government programs/agencies like FEMA is directly against the ethos that the Republican Party has preached since the 1980s.

Hell, Mike Johnson is refusing to call the House back to session to vote on more FEMA funding because he knows it would be a win for Biden/Harris. They care more about politics than helping Americans.
 
Soft power of monetary and equipment aid to foreign countries is one of the best investments the USA makes abroad.

And the amazing magic trick is that a majority of that money is paid to USA producers of the equipment/medication/etc., so it circles back into the pockets of American companies is and their employees (many of those in the defense and energy and ag and and pharmaceutical industries are Americans or at least are employed here).

For instance, Starlink terminals provided abroad and to disaster victims inside the USA are not donated by Elon Musk and Starlink. The U.S. government pays them as a government contractor for the service and equipment and delivery and retrieval and maintenance and insurance.
 
Paine said:
If Republicans in Congress wanted to give more money to FEMA, there wouldn’t be a single Democrat who would vote against that. Either in the budget process or a clean bill. Money going to government programs/agencies like FEMA is directly against the ethos that the Republican Party has preached since the 1980s.

Hell, Mike Johnson is refusing to call the House back to session to vote on more FEMA funding because he knows it would be a win for Biden/Harris. They care more about politics than helping Americans.
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So painfully true . . !
 
Collective defense and collective problem solving comes at a cost to us to hold our friends and allies together. It's all very transactional in most cases but not all. Israel might be a political outlier example.

And I tend to think its cheaper this way. Can you imagine if we went it alone on defense what it would actually cost us? What about preventing nuclear proliferation? What about our foreign military bases that might not be there if not for some of this foreign aid.

Without banding together, there would be unnecessary economic costs I am sure.

What about coming problems like artificial intelligence? No way that gets resolved without everyone banding together.

We've tried isolationism in the past. Found out pretty quick it was a bad idea. The world without our leadership (and bribes) would be much worse I suspect.
 
I don't know what to say. But I pretty sure my father-in-law, who was in North Africa, came ashore on June 7, 1944, was with the 2nd Infantry Division until St. Lo, and spent the rest of the war in a hospital and rehab could explain it to you. Similarly, my father, who was wounded on Guadalcanal and Guam and participated in several other island campaigns with the Marines could explain it to you in detail. Both explanations would including pulling up shirts and pants legs to show you the costs of ignoring the rest of the world.
 
nycfan said:
Soft power of monetary and equipment aid to foreign countries is one of the best investments the USA makes abroad.
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This is the most critical point. Modern conservatives (especially MAGA) scorn soft power for a variety of reasons, but it's always been one of the most effective aspects of our foreign policy. That's why it's so dumb to think of NATO as a protection racket where other countries need to pay their "fair share" to earn our help, for example. The value we get to US foreign interests from having a strong NATO and good relationships with our NATO allies is worth far too much to threaten to blow the whole thing up because, like, Estonia is $100m below its projected contribution of weapons and soldiers.

We don't help foreign countries purely out of altruism. It benefits US interests abroad to have good relationships with foreign countries and foreign governments. And as the country on top of the global pecking order, what really benefits us more than anything is stability. MAGA fools want to put that stability at risk by withdrawing from global geopolitics and telling everyone else to fend for themselves, because they naively believe it won't affect us if the whole world burns down around us.
 
mpaer said:
Note. The OP said why so much Humanitarian aid
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Focusing purely on humanitarian aid puts the number even lower. If we’re spending about $39.2 billion per year on foreign aid, 1/3 of that would fall into the humanitarian aid bucket, with the other 2/3 consisting of development and security aid/assistance.

So that’s $13 billion, roughly, per year on humanitarian aid abroad.

A low cost for all the benefits that humanitarian aid provides us, such as containing disease outbreaks. We can and should spend more at home and abroad. I don’t think disaster aid is a major driver of inflation.
 
mpaer said:
We don’t live in a vacuum. We also historically do very little. Most foreign aid goes to things where American supplies , engineers,steel is required
If we scale back one of our adversaries will step in and gain influence
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Yes, we buy influence...and friends. Well...except for our 51st state where our influence seems to amount to zilch. But "We also historically do very little"? You need to think about that statement with emphasis given to WW2 and after. Heck, we even contributed to rebuilding the nation that destroyed Europe initially. Admittedly, in rebuilding Europe we also had an ulterior motive...USSR.
 
It surely seems as if the GOP is down to just a few core assumptions and strategies:
(1) Assume that a large slice of voters are just ignorant. They don't understand how budgets work; they don't understand how inflation works; they have no idea when they are being lied to

(2) A large slice of GOP voters - also wildly ignorant - are driven by irrational fears. They used to be afraid of gay marriages. And they were afraid of men going to the bathroom in women's rooms, Now they are afraid of transsexuals. (And, God help them, drag shows.) These people are just stupid

(3) And the GOP can always count on a large chunk of voters just being racists,
 
grubar said:
It surely seems as if the GOP is down to just a few core assumptions and strategies:
(1) Assume that a large slice of voters are just ignorant. They don't understand how budgets work; they don't understand how inflation works; they have no idea when they are being lied to

(2) A large slice of GOP voters - also wildly ignorant - are driven by irrational fears. They used to be afraid of gay marriages. And they were afraid of men going to the bathroom in women's rooms, Now they are afraid of transsexuals. (And, God help them, drag shows.) These people are just stupid

(3) And the GOP can always count on a large chunk of voters just being racists,
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And don't forget people that just hate taxes and think Pubs are better at that
 
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