well, time to stand with Libya.... get your flags and ribbons, step right up!!!
- Thread starter GregV814
- Start date
WingsOfGold
Well-Known Member
Binary sharks are people too and they have to eat.
SamSpade
Well-Known Member
Sending humanitarian aid is a small price to pay for good will - even if it doesn't appear to surface.
My FAVORITE clip from the ST: The Next Generation is this one:
(Set up - for those unfamiliar, the current leader of the Klingon Empire was placed in power by no small effort of Picard himself - against others in a brutal civil war - to which he obliquely refers)
See, when you DON'T send humanitarian aid - believe it or not - the Iranians, the North Koreans, the Russians, the Chinese - they all RUSH to "help". You go to these nations, and the local hospital is run by the Chinese; the schools build by Russians - and the dam built by Iran. If you DON'T at least toss your spare change their way -
They will show their "gratitude" - elsewhere.
My FAVORITE clip from the ST: The Next Generation is this one:
(Set up - for those unfamiliar, the current leader of the Klingon Empire was placed in power by no small effort of Picard himself - against others in a brutal civil war - to which he obliquely refers)
See, when you DON'T send humanitarian aid - believe it or not - the Iranians, the North Koreans, the Russians, the Chinese - they all RUSH to "help". You go to these nations, and the local hospital is run by the Chinese; the schools build by Russians - and the dam built by Iran. If you DON'T at least toss your spare change their way -
They will show their "gratitude" - elsewhere.
Libya sees the Biden Administration throwing billions away to dictators and they want a piece of that action.
The problem with buying "allies" is that they don't stay bought.
Plus we're tapped out. We have our own problems in this country and yet we're expected to hemorrhage money at terrorist nations....so they'll like us? Because while taking our money, they're probably not doing back door deals with NK/China/Iran/etc?
SamSpade
Well-Known Member
I was looking the other day at the cost of my project, for the government. I won't go into the weeds for this one - but it runs just under 100 million.
Wow. That's a lot.
It's 2 thousandths of one percent of the federal budget. It's what happens when you hear lots of big numbers and think, damn, they spend THAT kind of money? No kidding, it is a lot - but it is pocket lint compared to what they pay for lots of things. A trillion is a million million. And we spend 5 trillion a year. Giving 50 million in aid is the dust on your countertop.
And you're right. But NO ONE stays our friend. The closest thing we have to a "friend" internationally is the UK. And then - possibly - Canada. And both of them were our sworn enemy for the first 100 years of our existence.
An old friend of mine observed that nations do not have FRIENDS. They have allies - nations which side with us on an issue of importance to them. It always amazes me that some of our best allies - we were once at WAR with. SOME of our biggest enemies - well they were once our ally.
Lots of these nations are your ally - until they aren't. That's the case with everyone. Your dog is your best friend - until you reach for their bone.
I had an ex-husband who used to make that same argument. He ended up declaring bankruptcy because of all that pocket lint.
What will 50 million buy other than aid to terrorists? "I'm sorry, we can't afford to revamp and oversee our Veterans' facilities. We're giving that money to Libya instead." What are some other things we "can't afford" because we're sending that money to Ukraine, and Libya, and whatever other shithole country?
Or let's go another way with it:
How much of your personal money are you willing to give to Libya to "aid" them in their flood? They come begging, how big of a check are you personally gonna stroke?
SamSpade
Well-Known Member
We don't seem to have any problem affording anything anymore.
The overwhelming majority of our nation's funds go to paying for elderly healthcare and their pensions.
Right behind that is to pay all the people who defend this country and to pay for the resources they use to do that.
I suppose I could say that I am not willing to buy one more plane or tank, and just give ME and my family that money BACK. Of course it doesn't work that way. Taxes are the necessary evil to pay to run this country.
The Democrats make the argument all the time that all the money spent on defense could be eliminated to spend on taking care of ourselves. But that never happens. They want the money to spend on whatever they want - and it's never to improve and make our lives better. Biden has proven that beyond all argument. Hell they made the argument that police departments didn't need money AT ALL - that all the crime ridden communities would be better served with alternatives to police and prisons.
The Republicans make similar arguments - but it never ever happens. So I think making the idea of not spending bits of money here and there would be better spent elsewhere, because in the larger picture, it does not happen. I wish I had a dime for every time I've heard that we could do so much more with the money we spend on humanitarian aid, elsewhere. If we didn't pay a nickel in humanitarian aid, it would pay the interest on our debt - for eight days. It would pay Social Security for under 48 hours.
And to the point I've made earlier - when we DON'T help - others move in. I've seen them. I've been IN hospitals abroad built by our competitors. And the people are grateful.
GregV814
Well-Known Member
And if you didn't pay for cable it would pay your mortgage for 1 day. If you didn't buy groceries it would pay your electric bill for two months.
I don't really care for arguments like that because they are meaningless. It's used car salesman talk - "If you skip your Starbucks latte every day you'd have the payment for this car!" Well I don't get a Starbucks latte every day or any day. So now what?
This country shouldn't be in debt. But we are because our bloated greasy government spends money like a teenager with a Mommy and Daddy credit card. More and more of our money is being taken for taxes and we're getting less and less for it. I don't believe for one second the government that didn't give a damn about Hawaii is all fretty about Libya. That money will not benefit one single Libyan civilian and we all know it.
Exactly when - ever - has "humanitarian aid" solved a problem? All those places we've "helped" are still the same shitholes they always were. All that happened is the warlords got a bigger palace.
SamSpade
Well-Known Member
The point was - it's a trickle. It's a lot to you and me but for a budget for a nation it's the equivalent of not buying that candy in the checkout when you get groceries. NOT buying it has such a trivial effect on saving money for other things, it's barely able to be measured. Your daughter cries out DAD! We need to save for my college! Like it has any effect.
I've seen evidence of nations with resources we WANT - or support we want - go to someone else. Most of the time, it's been people that are NOT hostile to us. It promotes a good image. To my estimation, BRICS is an example of us letting these countries ally with our enemies, because our image abroad isn't favorable.
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And my point is that those things add up, AND that money could be put to better use.
I'm going to insult you for a minute but I don't really mean to insult you personally or offend you
:This is the difference between government and a small business owner. The government is all, "Eh, a billion here, a billion there, chump change...." and small business owners see expenses that are tightly managed. You work for government, which has an unlimited piggy bank courtesy of We the People. I am a small business owner going, "Hmmm....I can save $40 a month if I switch my phone plan...." I suspect this is where we each get our mindset regarding where money comes from, and investing it vs. spending it.
Sure, $10mil is a drop in the bucket with respect to our national budget. But does that mean it should be frittered away and wasted when it could be put to good use?
Of course government wastes money - it's not theirs. Why do you think politicians with assets in the hundreds of millions panhandle campaign money from people making $15/hr? They would never in a million years spend their own money on crap, but they have no qualms about wasting *our* money. And then they dare come to us going, "Oh sorry, we can't afford these things for Americans to make ya'lls lives better."
You're not going to convince me that the billion$$ our government wastes and uses for their own personal gain is of no consequence.
Hijinx
Well-Known Member
Speaking of a trickle, didn't we just trickle $700 dollars apiece to the people of Maui who got burned out.?
By the way has anyone heard about those people in the news lately?
How many are dead now and how many of the thousand who were missing have been found.?
Nice to help the people of Libya I suppose, but how about a little help for our own countrymen.
By the way has anyone heard about those people in the news lately?
How many are dead now and how many of the thousand who were missing have been found.?
Nice to help the people of Libya I suppose, but how about a little help for our own countrymen.
No poor person ever loves their rich neighbor. The people with drug addicted kids in the gutter don't love anyone with fine upstanding offspring. Sure, our politicians do some chit that should get their heads on a pike, but we have always been an incredibly generous nation....and have always been met with ingratitude and hostility...
...because nobody likes their rich neighbor, and what they hate even more is having to take charity from that rich neighbor.
So if we're indeed trying to buy loyalty, that's the dumbest thing I ever heard.
I'm pretty sure what we're really buying is money laundering. Notice how our politicians get extraordinarily wealthy on their Congressional salary? How does that happen? Especially when so many are living in poverty in this country??
SamSpade
Well-Known Member
Not loyalty. Our BRAND. There were more polls conducted recently that said that people around the world see the UNITED STATES as the biggest threat to the rest of the world. Clearly, we're projecting the wrong image - and nations like China and Iran and India are BEATING us. Because they see the value in "advertising".
SamSpade
Well-Known Member
(shrug)
I mean, I've worked in the federal government for over 30 years. Of course there's waste. A great deal of it is the nature of the beast - when you run a company that cannot go broke, cannot be overtaken by a competitor and never has to change the way it does things - of course you'll have waste. Some agencies do it by grossly mismanaging staff and then outsourcing, because they screwed up. I've seen departments buy equipment they don't need, because of the stupid ass budgetary thing that says, if you don't spend it, you'll get LESS next year - it ENCOURAGES waste and punishes thrift.
Heck, I bet if they removed THAT little quirk, we'd save tens of millions right there. I've seen departments publish newsletters no one reads, and divisions hand out periodicals no one reads, send people on training they never use and dammit if they don't "re-organize" about every 8-10 years. They do some things that are wasteful, because it never occurred to them to do otherwise.
The joke often is, when asked, how many people work here - the answer is "About half". Because the federal government doesn't really lay off or fire anyone. Like, ever.
And I used to be punctilious about tiny expenses under the idea that "they all add up". Somewhat. I found MORE often, money was wasted due to lack of planning. It did me NO GOOD to cut little expenses if they weren't set aside for the important things.
The government, sadly - CANNOT "save" money, technically. Whatever they budget, they have to spend it.
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I do see waste as inevitable. The government is too damned big. I ALSO see the government spending money on things that SEEM wasteful, but turn out to be incredibly astute and show astonishing foresight. When I worked for the Postal Service in the 80's, I'd heard that one of the research divisions was investigating protocols for "email" - which I thought was massively stupid, because about one in a few thousand people even HAD a computer. WASTEFUL. I still know people who believe the entire space program to be a ridiculous politically motivated boondoggle - an issue I could tear apart for days, but at the very least, spawned technology that brought us into the world we live in and depend on.
Bottom line - WASTE is very often, a matter of opinion. I think some of the money we "waste" on other nations is money well spent.