Lol

[Blubbartron]

I'd say it's more like feeding your fat son while a bunch of starving immigrants are sitting around him wondering why you don't care.

Yeah, again, we really do have homeless and starving people in America, too. There aren't nearly enough shelters for all the homeless, and space is reserved for women and children first almost always. Given the prevalence of veteran homelessness, I would think people would care more.

[Ksandra]

Except it's more like investing your money so later on you can eat at 5 star restaurants every day, at the cost of not having dessert once a week.

A lot of our aid is simply enough to avoid a complete economic collapse in some of these countries. It's more about sustaining, than any kind of investing for improvement.

[Plow]

I understand the benefits of foreign aid but it's really fucking insane just how much even a one single time investment of $50 bil could do to fight poverty.

I mean, even the most incredibly simple view of it: 2x billion dollar shelters in each of the 25 cities with the highest poverty rates. Just imagine the possibilities...

or 2 $100 million shelters and $900 mil in operating funding for each of those...

[Cliron]

Not an economist, but I find it kinda ironic that some people are splitting pennies over foreign aid when the opportunity cost of all the funding that goes into military could be funneled into: education (Hi2UmortageLevelDebt@22), Healthcare( just found out that my company will be giving me health insurance, but I'll still have to page a couple of hundred PER MONTH as my contribution...In Ireland, the top private healthcare insurance is 100euro a month, which I wouldnt even pay all of due to employer contribution) and finally, social programs / infrastructure (homelessness, new roads, etc).

Offhand, does anyone have any reliable figure to the percentage of all military spending relative to all spending in the US?
TLDR: When you spend billions on the military, you can't spend that billions elsewhere.

[Ksandra]

when the opportunity cost of all the funding that goes into military could be funneled into: education (Hi2UmortageLevelDebt@22), Healthcare

To be fair. A lot of military money does go to education and healthcare. It's just limited to those actually in the military lol

[Blubbartron]

Not an economist, but I find it kinda ironic that some people are splitting pennies over foreign aid when the opportunity cost of all the funding that goes into military could be funneled into: education (Hi2UmortageLevelDebt@22), Healthcare( just found out that my company will be giving me health insurance, but I'll still have to page a couple of hundred PER MONTH as my contribution...In Ireland, the top private healthcare insurance is 100euro a month, which I wouldnt even pay all of due to employer contribution) and finally, social programs / infrastructure (homelessness, new roads, etc).

Offhand, does anyone have any reliable figure to the percentage of all military spending relative to all spending in the US?
TLDR: When you spend billions on the military, you can't spend that billions elsewhere.

I'm not sure what the percentage is, but I do know that we spend more absolute dollars on military/defense than the next ~15-20 countries combined. I'm with you on this point, for largely the same reasons. I don't care about the rest of the world that much; we have problems in our own country we should be taking care of first, and we're dropping the ball big time.

[djzombie]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...-f-s-sake.html

this is over a year old at this point but the first time i've seen it was today, im sure some of you have already read it but worth the possible repost.

was gonna quote some of it but theres quite a lot and dont wanna cannibalize the thing

[BaneTheBrawler]

lol @ title change.

[Kohan]

I don't disagree that foreign aid has a purpose, I'm just saying it feels wrong to give money to other countries when we have our own poor and downtrodden that we should take care of first.

The problem is that neglecting foreign aid leads to less overall capital to work with. What you're suggesting would not fix problems—it would create them. The money may come from elsewhere, but it should not come at the sacrifice of foreign aid, as the consequences of eliminating it would be catastrophic, and far more costly than the aid itself.

I don't care about the rest of the world that much; we have problems in our own country we should be taking care of first, and we're dropping the ball big time.

The fact that we give so little foreign aid is in fact more emblematic of our problems than the fact that we give it at all.

[Tajin]

y'all is posting in a test thread

Late to the party

[Buffy]

The fact that we give so little foreign aid is in fact more emblematic of our problems than the fact that we give it at all.

Agree entirely.

[archibaldcrane]

http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/14/news...html?iid=s_mpm

In its updated budget outlook released Tuesday, the CBO now estimates the annual deficit for this fiscal year will be $642 billion or 4% of GDP. That's $203 billion less than the agency estimated a few months ago. The CBO attributes the improved estimate to higher-than-expected tax revenues and an increase in payments to the Treasury by mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
By 2015, the deficit will fall to its lowest point of the next decade - 2.1% of GDP. And it will remain below 3% until 2019, at which point it will start to increase again. Deficits below 3% are considered sustainable because it means budget shortfalls are not growing faster than the economy.

[archibaldcrane]

Also

Similarly, the CBO now estimates the country's total debt - the sum of annual deficits accrued over decades - will fall to roughly 71% of GDP in 2018 and 2019. That's four percentage points below where it is today. But then the debt will begin climbing higher again, reaching 73.6% by 2023.

[archibaldcrane]

Over the next 10 years, our debt is projected to be lower (as a percentage of GDP) than it is right now.

[ringthree]

First video

1) Ignoring the debt is blatantly ignoring the fact that we pay interest on that debt. 6% of our revenue in 2012 was immediately lost to interest payments. That number can only go up until we start having a mandatory surplus budget every year and pay down the debt. Even if we stay steady with the debt, that number will most likely go up as interest rates go up, which means we'll have to cut *more* spending later even though revenue and spending stayed the same.
2) He *almost* had it right when he was on the chart comparing % increase of various things over the years, adjusted for inflation. If he would have added one more line showing the average salary increase over the past 60 years, the reason why government spending has shot up 3000% would be plain as the nose on your face. Cutting spending will have an immediate harmful effect on our citizens and our economy. We need to be raising the minimum wage to something that's livable in order to allow people to live without government subsidization (welfare, housing assistance, etc). In addition to raising the minimum wage we need to put caps on the maximum difference between the lowest paid worker and the highest paid worker in corporations. The more inequality in salary distribution, the greater the need for government assistance will be (CEOs making 350x the *average* worker is bullshit).

Second video

1) Huzzah, he mentioned the interest on the debt. I like how he remembers it when it helps make his point. If you took out that chunk for interest, the revenue we generated in that year *would* cover the mandatory spending.
2) Is this motherfucker suggesting that there should be no social programs whatsoever? Because if he's not, then the question of "which cuts" actually is pretty fucking important, contrary to what he thinks.

Third video

1) Does this guy actually have a PhD in economics, or is it some other bullshit? I notice he's the "director of undergraduate studies in economics." That doesn't mean he necessarily knows dick about the subject.
2) Assuming he does have a doctorate in economics, how the fuck can someone with a doctorate not understand that there's always two parts to the equation? The amount people (the government) are willing and able to spend, and the amount people (doctors/healthcare organizations) are willing and able to charge. It doesn't take a fucking rocket scientist to realize that if we started regulating the healthcare industry (since obamacare adds regulation to the health insurance industry) that we could dramatically reduce the amount the government is getting charged for care provided to people under things like medicare/medicaid.

Come to George Mason University, and you will see retards like this guy running all over the economics department. Their courses are just political proselytizing for Ayn Rand, and have nothing to do with economics past a supply and demand curve.

[ringthree]

Agree entirely.

Not to mention the return on investment on foreign aid is insanely high.

[Blubbartron]

Not to mention the return on investment on foreign aid is insanely high.

Yeah, I still don't really follow this train of thought. We give aid to 3rd world countries and they slowly become not-so-3rd world. As they grow, the claim is that they will decide we were awesome and helped them out, so they'll start buying stuff from us, thus increasing our GDP (as if that really mattered). Isn't that an insanely stupid thing for anyone with any knowledge of economics to suggest or believe? A country with limited resources is going to find the cheapest supplier of whatever it is that they need. America isn't exactly huge on exports to begin with. Most of our "exports" (if you could call them that) are luxury items and fatness (soda, McDonald's franchises, etc).

I guess I have two questions that I hope people can answer for me so I can understand the concept better:
1) Why is increasing the GDP important? Please don't say taxes/government revenue, because most of the increases in GDP you'll see as a result of foreign aid will be corporate profits, and we all know how little they pay in taxes. I want to know how increasing the GDP affects the everyday American.
2) Why do we think countries that are in the process of creating infrastructure and industrializing will want to buy our overpriced garbage when they can get similar shit for much cheaper from China?

I could *maybe* understand the concept of foreign aid mitigating certain terrorist hot spot growth due to how impoverished people are in those areas, but it presumes that our aid actually gets to the people that are the most at risk (unlikely), and it presumes that the incidence of terrorism on American soil is high enough to care (it's laughably low - people are paranoid because of the media and fear mongering).

[Kyreth]

A lot of our aid is simply enough to avoid a complete economic collapse in some of these countries. It's more about sustaining, than any kind of investing for improvement.

Pretty much this. In the process, it just ends up getting fingers pointed at us for sustaining whatever corrupted government is keeping the barely-functional status quo and we get folks from there trying to bomb us anyway.

You'd have thought we learned that paying the Danegeld doesn't keep the Dane away in the end centuries ago, but nope. 50+ billion dollars would buy an awful lot of low-income housing development domestically, for example.

[Kyreth]

Not to mention the return on investment on foreign aid is insanely high.

Really? I can see that in aid to more developed countries or in cases where we then exploit the country's natural resources (lolIraq), but seriously?

Is it even moral to be sitting there propping up whatever gov't in question is busy working their people for pennies so we can get (insert natural resource of choice) cheap until something finally snaps?

[Kohan]

Yeah, I still don't really follow this train of thought.

I'm specifically not going to answer the questions that you asked, as they are essentially missing the point. Instead, I'm going to try to direct you toward understanding what foreign aid does, and how it is not simply quantifiable in the ways you're asking about.

In relation to how effective foreign aid monies are in other countries when compared against how useful they would be in our own:



The various ways in which foreign aid helps facilitate effective improvements in other countries, and everywhere, especially in relation to vaccine and other medical developments—starting at 03:13:



A more in-depth discussion about the former (with extremely loud jingles bookending the video—be prepared for that)—starting at 01:43:



As the last video mentions malaria and HIV, it also points out the importance of foreign aid in keeping various ailments under control, as even with our comparatively superior health care system, the uncontrolled spread of disease could devastate us. This is just one of the many ways in which foreign aid benefits the United States, not to mention any country that provides it to others. We've already talked about the importance of brand name recognition and national security, so add that to the list.

You can't just look at foreign aid as a dollar sign, but if you choose to nonetheless, you should realize how minuscule of an effect that keeping foreign aid to ourselves would have. (That's what the first video was meant to summarize.) It's easy to say, "if we had a million dollars and spread it among so many people, blah blah blah," but that doesn't take into account every aspect of how you would actually choreograph the distribution and application of those funds.

Further, it doesn't consider the day-to-day of their lives either, nor their medical expenses, nor the greater impact that said medical expenses have on our society, and so on, so forth. And if we're to bring up the matter of diseases again, consider how destructive it would be if our most transient poor contracted ailments that we didn't do anything about, and how horribly losing blue collar workers would affect our economy, and the list goes on...

Again, what is an insubstantial amount of money in our country can be a gargantuan and effective sum in others, and the kind of wealth and well-being that we receive in return is multifaceted. You appear to be looking at it like money is money—as if it's black and white—while not understanding what that money can do for the big picture.