For the latest from the right wing reaction machine, look no further than the panicked emails and postings from my neighbor. She’s not really a conservabot in the sense that she seeks out the AM dial for Heritage Foundation propaganda, but that stuff does find its way into her borderline authoritarian mind before it’s rewritten and sent to me and countless others.
Within hours of President Obama holding the first August batch of Social Security hostage in an effort to exploit the Republican’s faulty policy on the debt ceiling, the discussion turned to foreign aid. The resulting communiqué read something like this:
[America] gives more than $58 Billion a year in foreign assistance. According to Forbes: Afghanistan $4 Billion; Pakistan $3.1 Billion, Israel $3 Billion, Egypt $1.5 Billion; requests for Russia $68.7M, China $12.9M, Nigeria $647.7M, Cuba $20M.
Sometimes this is too easy. This is the same neighbor who sent me an email last December outraged over the $87 million we give to the United Nations. When I replied that $87 million amounts to approximately 20 seconds of government spending, she replied with “sorry, I sent it to the wrong Steve in my address book.
For some perspective, let’s examine this $58 billion in the context of the deficit, which leads to the debt, which is the subject embarrassing the right wing over all this. The current annual deficit is about $1.2 trillion (this is because the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are now on the budget, something the last president conveniently neglected to do).
We’re talking about just the deficit, one year’s worth of overspending. This isn’t the overall federal budget – although it’s about 35 percent of it. This is not the $15 trillion debt, of which 90 percent belongs to fiscally conservative Republican presidents. No, the $1.2 trillion deficit represents one year’s contribution to the debt, which has only decreased three times in my lifetime – 1969, 1999 and 2000. The last two happened after President Clinton destroyed the U.S. economy in the 1990s by raising marginal tax rates on the wealthiest…er… the “job creators.”
Bill Gates was worth around $58 billion at his peak before he decided to leave Microsoft and give it all away. It’s an astronomical amount. It’s a stack of $100 bills approximately 30 miles high. It’s also the amount the Republican House of Representatives – the people we elected because they’re so damn good with money, so much better than the liberals –this is how much they overspend every 18 days, including holidays and weekends.
The criminal amount we spend in foreign aid is just under 5 percent of the annual deficit. By comparison, military spending is about half of the deficit. Off the table. If loopholes are closed on corporate taxes, if we return to the Clinton-era top marginal tax rates of 39 percent, if we implement a miniscule transaction tax on all Wall Street speculative activity, if we tax corporate jets, and if we modify the inheritance tax, the deficit is estimated to be cut in half. That’s also off the table.
All of this could be done tomorrow and have a noticeable, positive impact by the end of 2011. But it’s off the table.
We could leave Afghanistan and Iraq tomorrow, but winding down an occupation can’t happen overnight. That’s the only thing that seems to be on the table because even Republicans, tone-deaf to almost every other issue, are aware that the country is sick of these “wars.”
So as we spend our Wednesday choking down the talking point that the other countries are sucking away our money, keep in mind that we’re talking about a marginal issue. And if you’re like my neighbor and you’re going to worked up over a 5 percent problem, I’d hate to be living next door to you when you learn about the other 95 percent.
