Let’s not end foreign aid. A friend shared a post on Facebook, which asks how America, with a 19 trillion dollar debt can spend “billions” on foreign aid:

Perspective: Foreign aid is about 1% of the federal budget

Apparently America’s budget is 3.8 trillion dollars per year. And we spend about 37 billion dollars on foreign aid, about 1%. And a bit over a third of that is spent on military aid.

How often is that military aid saving us the expense of sending our own military?

And the humanitarian aid is probably doing a lot of good. Plus it usually buys us good will. We sorely need good will after all the damage we did letting Bush’s destabilize the mideast, and then dumping the subprime mortgage fiasco on the world.

The cost of failed wars are many time larger

Another perspective. The unnecessary War on Iraq cost between $3 and $4 trillion. And combine it with the unnecessary war in Afghanistan, and the total looks like $6 trillion, almost twice the whole US annual budget! Some of that is future medical expenses, but about $2 trillion of that is already added to our debt.

The war in Afghanistan was largely a failure. If the Bush team had brains, they would have taken the advice that everyone told them- not to go in. Russia had made the same mistake in Iraq, battling for 9 years an expensive, hopeless war against an entrenched enemy. A decent plan would have been to do extensive reconnaissance, and then bomb the Taliban to kill 20,000 of them, twice the number of casualties we took in 9/11. A decent alternative would have been to attack with enough strength to cut off the Taliban’s escape to Pakistan. We should have inflicted the wounds on the ground and then left right afterward.

The war in Iraq wasn’t a failure, it was a huge fiasco. In the beginning it went okay, but then the Bush team decided to dismiss the army and like all the experts predicted, all hell broke loose. Not only did civil war start, but it spawned ISIS whom we’re still fighting today as well as housing some of their refugees. Had we not dismissed their army, we could have caught Saddam, checked all the likely places they stored “WMD”s, and gotten out.

These wars were Republicans gift to America. Gore would not have made this mistake.

And while we’re adding perspective, we spend about $580 billion on our military every year and about $160 billion on the Veterans Administration, together, about 20 times what we spend on foreign aid…

The war on drugs is expensive, too

Apparently the war on drugs has cost about a trillion dollars over the years, too. And it hasn’t lessened drug usage at all. It’s been called a “trillion dollar failure.” Currently, we pay $30-$50 billion a year for the drug war. And every dollar we spend on drug treatment saves about $7. If we legalized drugs, we’d also collect money taxing it which could pay for the drug treatment. So we could easily save $30-$50 billion a year. (I don’t know if this includes the money we’d save from not imprisoning people, plus from having them productive in society.)

So please, have some perspective

Spending money on foreign aid is a tiny fraction of the budget, and it probably saves us more money than it costs.

If we really want to save money, we should not elect another incompetent Republican into office, and we should support Hillary ending the drug war.

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