Something struck me when I was reading this fine report about the closure of the dreadful USAID department, and it relates to budget priorities. Consider this little litany of silliness:
Now just in cash terms, those items alone account for about $7.5million, being sent to furriners.
The question: Wouldn’t those dollars have been better spent by sending them to those folks in North Carolina blown out of their homes by tropical storm Helene?
And the corollary question: Wouldn’t those “hundreds of thousands of meals” been more appreciated by those same North Carolinians, many of whom, months after the storm, are still living in TENTS?
Let’s put all this into concrete terms that people can understand.
The problem with being such a wealthy country is that sometimes we’re blase about sums of money that seem trivial in the grand scheme of things; $7.5million doesn’t seem like a lot of money compared to other budgetary expenditures, and indeed it isn’t at a macro level.
But let’s convert that “macro” to “micro”. Giving $75,000 dollars each to a hundred families in desperate need of assistance — American families, let me remind you — has the potential to turn their lives around completely. And that’s worth a lot more than a ticket to an LGBTOSTFU opera in Colombia.
Stop pissing money away on foreigners and start looking after American taxpayers.
This is exactly why Trump got elected. This waste has been going on for decades and no career politician is going to stop this gravy train. There is no doubt that these expenditures in foreign countries is absolutely wrong. I bet the real reason this was spent was to make other countries like us rather than the Soviet Union. I wonder how much of the money actually goes to those stated programs and instead is diverted to CIA operations and such or just outright bribes.
On the list above, every single one of those items is something that those foreign countries should pay for if they want to. It’s not the responsibility of the American taxpayer to fund any of those programs. All of that money would be far better spent here in the United States to provide better education for people, better roads etc or just outright cut from the US budget and therefore lower our taxes.
All of those dollars would have been better off left in the pockets of the people they were stolen from. Stealing is never good.
I’m with Ghost – every dollar saved should be discounted from our 2025 income taxes owed. Until such time as we do away with income tax completely. Return it to the people you stole it from. Us.
Those dollars would have been better ‘spent’ by passing the out to bums on the street. In packets big enough to get them good a drunk.
You are thinking like a tax-payer.
Instead, how about thinking like a tax-burner.
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As a tax-burner, any money in any amount from any source is free for the taking, but to maintain the charade of ‘self-less state service’, I just need to tweak the route from tax-payers to my pocket.
I need to give my scam-agency an appropriate name, something palatable, something helpful sounding.
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My skim-scam needs a name I can drench in helpful propaganda.
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As a tax-burner, I live for the scam.
And what better way to conceal the ‘re-distribution’ than titling the scam with something sounding altruistic.
Perhaps ‘foreign-aid’?
That sounds helpful, right?
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Of course, I need numbers big enough to skim my fair share.
That requires many billions of fedbux, flowing endlessly from nameless faceless bureaucrats deep in the bowels of some bureaucracy.
How about using my Out-Of-Thin-Air™ powers duly invested in me to fabricate a continuing source of free money for TheNeedy©?
How about an ‘agency’ to ‘aid’ desperate poor folks in far-off strange places, maybe something along the lines of ‘U.S.A.I.D.’?
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Those gullible American tax-payers are all about helping folks, so I am just helping them feel good about helping.
A win-win!
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And those fake ‘recipients’ off in some strange land, let’s have them speaking some unintelligible foreign gibberish.
If I was me, I would pick a place known for corruption, so nobody will suspect me.
“It was all their fault, I was just trying to help!”
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While I am at it, I think I might build a foreign regime in some far-away land, a place without any functional government… and I can call it ‘regime change’, because the old regime was too corrupt, but with my guidance, it will all be better.
How do I make a new ‘government’?
Through other skim-scams of giving them tax-payer fedbux from other ‘agencies’!
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Who could resist helping those poor foreigners with new roads, clean water, ‘rural electrification’!
Of course, none of our Americans need bother traveling to that ShxtholeOfACountry™ to verify my good deeds and accomplishments.
Just trust me.
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That alone should net me a few billion with a ‘B’ fedbux for my troubles, tax-free… because taxes are for the gullible.
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Disclaimer:
I tend to think like a bush-whacker.
SING IT, Brothers!
And how much of that graft came back around in the back door for Dem pols, their contractor friends and the requisite 10% for the Big Guy?