While i agree in principle…at least mostly, our nation has become the worlds largest economy and strongest nation by protecting our friends and our interests. It has become a hole that is almost impossible to dig out of.
Our much larger problems have to do with wasteful military spending (they cannot pass a simple audit—something every manager has experienced and mostly survived); we do not collect enough tariffs; and we have a tax and spend poilicy that does not consider results.
People say they want a government that runs like a business. Well, if that is the case they need to study business:
1. Pass Audits and manage to a budget.
2. Establish specific goals for every dollar spent—what is to be accomplished and what does success look like in specific, measureable ways.
3. We have to constantly review hiring and “right sizing” to make sure the workforce is efficient.
4. Civil Service and Military Retirements should be examined and right sized.
5. Protect our markets and access to foreign markets through the effective use of tariffs and incentives.
6. Re-create the Social Security System. Protect those within the system who cannot “change” at this stage-but make it more reasonable and efficient for those entering the system. Max out payments out of the system, extend contributions for high earners.
7. Establish a flat tax that insures that the first dollar for every worker is included: Everyone has to have some skin in the game. Having an income tax system that excludes an awful lot of people is not fair to the country.
Once we do that stuff—or some of it—we can start to right the ship.
But, almost none of that will happen because our leaders don’t love our country enough to suggest that it is fat, lazy, and has cancer. Instead, our leaders give us sugar and metaphoric cigarettes.
Foreign aid is a tiny part of the problem. You could stop it all and very little would change financially—but the impacts to our overall economy would be horrible.
“Our much larger problems have to do with wasteful military spending (they cannot pass a simple audit.”
Because there are actually no accountability records to even audit. Credited funds we pass are disbursed out from the IMF directly to the receiving awardees. Only the IMF has any records of where it actually went. And as a private organization there is no legal way to ever get these records.
The appropriations listed in a funding bill in no way reflects accuracy of where it actually went out from the IMF. It is the perfect situation for “bait and switch” that can never be investigated or proven even if we tried.