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.