so, we send 40b a year to Israel, and 40b a year to Egypt. mostly because they are democracies in the Middle East. so, is all the democratic reorganization that is going on over there, just something to get the US to send some more money that it really can't afford to spend? wonder how much money we got devoted to creating democracies around the globe....

No.

The revolutions that we've seen this year throughout the Middle East are not a vast conspiracy to force the US into bankruptcy via foreign aid.

Also, where did that $40b come from? My understanding was that aid to Israel is closer to $2.5b/year and that Egypt was about the same.

-Fooglmog
Guy with no clue.

not sure about the 40b, i saw something about it somewhere. though it might not be a per year thing. maybe a per package dealy.

maybe i confused it with the total that we're sending out to everybody? dunno.

it's more about them raising the debt ceiling anyway. such a successful country that we're going to grind to a halt if they won't let us borrow more money. wonder if American teachers taught them how to do math.

$40B, (which is already not correct, as Foog pointed out) is sadly a drop in the bucket next to what they need to do; they could scrap ALL foreign aid and it wouldn't make much difference.

Scrapping foreign aid altogether would create a whole different set of political consequences.

earl: they will hate america if they deny their financial aid, as opposed to hating america while giving them their financial aid?

you and i disagree on something, now give me billions of dollars and see if we agree then?

Be careful categorizing aide in the broadest of senses. I know in some cases we're buying our own farmer's produce and then giving it as aid. Or when we give loans, etc. They're just all structured differently. We could do without a lot it, but it takes time to unwind it.

Who cares? You're $14 Trillion in the hole and it's closer to $90 Trillion according to some analysts, so what does it matter? Do you think that the U.S. will actually pay off this debt?

The debt ceiling will continue to be raised despite these "intense negotiations" which, in reality, are just a charade. Both parties realize that their masters want the debt ceiling raised, but it's a political issue so both parties are ironing out how they can both look good and please their base.

90 Trillion? wonder if d'em d'ere analysts got a European education.

This ticks me off too. Nowhere in the Constitution does it specify that we are obligated to spread democracy, it only says that we are to have it for ourselves, and protect it for ourselves.

If other countries want it, let them get it the same way we did, buy fighting for it.

Cerberus of the MI

It's just money. Become a minimalist.

Currently other currencies trade on the US dollar. The US has two very quick solutions.

First is to simply create an amount of money in our economy equal to our debt and pay it off instantly. This will of course shatter the value of our currency and piss off everyone who ever lent us money.

The second option is to go isolationist. The US has all the resources a country could need without any foreign trade if we build the appropriate infrastructure.

I'm not sure which version causes more pain, but pain is something the US better get used to because we have debts to pay.

How does going isolationist help us stave off debt? Government debt isn't an issue of foreign aid or even discretionary spending that much. Eliminate both entirely and you still run a deficit. It's about mandatory entitlement spending. Otherwise it's like trying to get rid of grass simply by cutting it--works for 5 days and then it sprouts up again.

Terror, the US does not have the resources exploited necessary to forgo trade without drastic alteration of the American lifestyle. The US consumes 18.7 million barrels of oil per day and produces 7.8 million barrels of oil per day. It would take a decade to bridge that gap, if they started today. Even then, the US only has 21 billion barrels proved resource and 137 billion barrels probably resource, which equates to 3 and 20 years of current consumption rates. Take on shale oil, and you might have 30 years worth of supply left at current rates. Not really a long-term plan.

As for sudden devalution, it wouldn't cure the US' woes either. You might erase the 14 billion existing debt, but you would spike the price of oil and gold (approximately by 400% as there is ~3 trillion US cash in circulation) and drive up the cost of critical imports. The $10-14 trillion in new debt expected over the next decade would balloon (those 3.6 billion barrels of oil imported per year), and by 2030 you'd still have $25-30 trillion in debt as currently forecasted, only all American assets would be significantly devalued.

The US has had a policy of currency devaluation for the last 20 years since Alan Greenspan. Rather than shocking the system into complete disarray, they have moved slowly and consistantly down against the world basket. China, India, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and the EU, all of the US' largest trading partners, all have exchange rates 20-45% more favourable for the US since 1990.

I mentioned isolationism because it would prevent other countries from capitalizing on the weak US economy causing even further deterioration. Furthermore, I think it would save a lot of money if the US stopped being the global police force. As for oil, the US had better get serious about fixing its gluttonous ways anyway. The world will run out. I don't know if it will take 30 years or 100, but it's not renewable.

The second option would definitely cause some real hardship as well. I made no promise it wouldn't. In fact, I don't think there is a way to fix these money issues without making serious sacrifice. But my main point is that by using these measures, the debt could ultimately be cancelled and the US could then proceed from a position of economic strength.

The current policies have no end in sight. For all I know, the US government will be willing to put the US in debt so badly that the interest will exceed GDP. Maybe that would not happen in my lifetime, but I have a real problem with destroying the opportunity for prosperity for future generations. Even if it meant a lot of sacrifice and suffering for me, I'd at least know it was the right moral choice.

Quit trying to sweep it under the rug and fix the problem.

Isolationism would work, if the US' problems were no endemic to the economy structure. If you aren't borrowing money from the world, there is no liquidity in the US market. Without an influx of annual immigrants, the US has a falling natural population, so no new housing starts. Without restocking the labour force, the retiring baby boomers will decimate the experience and versitity of the labour pool. The USA's greatness has always been as a bastion of hope and liberty for the underdeveloped world. If it cuts itself off from the world, it's just a bunch of Americans dreaming of how things used to be.

I agree we need to stop burning oil, as it's wasteful of a resource needed for cheap plastics and other polymers. However, the world's reserves (proven and possible) are much deeper than the USA's and we have about 300 years at current consumption rates. That combined with the hopeful strides they are making towards synthetic oil produced by E. Coli bacteria that should be at the mass-production stage in the next 50-100 years. If we have a breakthrough like that, oil will be a renewable resource and the US will have the chokehold on it's price point.

As for interest exceeding GDP, there is very little chance of that in our lifetimes. Let's look at some of the deepest leveraged nations in the world: Luxembourg and Ireland.
Luxembourg has the highest per capita GDP (~$86k) in the world and the highest debt per capita in the world (~$3.8m). There interest payments have drifted between 40 and 65% of revenue spending. Irelands debt is 11x it's GDP and their interest payments have dropped from 6% to 2% of revenue.
Finally, the USA's current interest outlay is around 6.5% of outlays or 10% of revenues. Canada's for comparision is around 15% of outlays.

The buck stops here. We will be the generation to clean up the world's mess.

I live here in the state of North Carolina and see coastal or near coastal homes that were never intended for immigrants or anyone without a savings to buy and these home go unsold and deteriorate before my eyes.

The answer is no longer as simple as bringing in more people. If the US wishes to participate in a global economy then the US need to quit raping third world workers out of their honest wage, and I am willing to say that includes me.

So if a person works hard and becomes prosperous it was only because of their genes? Likewise if a person is born to lazy parents, that person is hopelessly doomed to become a loser? Those few people who actually manage to make something of themselves despite having loser parents are mutants?

Here I thought I could change bad social patterns by teaching. Turns out teaching is a waste of time. I should have gone into genetic engineering. I guess I'll just have to go back to school and get yet another advanced degree....

*sigh*

No wait! I don't need education after all. I have Nordic ancestry! Thank God.

no, our decline is caused by corruption and compassion. we spend our money on actors and song writers so that some people can live the american dream.

Jersey Shore and Lady Gaga are laying in the final blows to our once great nation

It would be interesting to take 100 white babies and another 100 black babies and have the whole lot of them raised by aboriginal South Americans so that no one has any particular advantage by being part of a majority population. I suspect the white kids and the black kids would all reach a similar level of prosperity on average, but I can't prove that any more than the counterargument that the white kids are genetically superior.

That experiment is never going to happen.

What does happen though I the reality that we live in a world that has people of many races. Even if it happened to be true, what possible advantage is there in telling a black kid he's got a handicap for being black and that people just don't figure he will do as well all things being equal? What is the psychological impact?

In the United States people of Asian decent repeatedly outperform whites. I refuse to think of myself as lesser and I refuse to pay homage to Asians because they happen to have parents that value education more highly than whites.

Telling a kid he's going to grow up to be a lazy criminal is the stupidest thing I could possibly do since such prophecies are are frequently self-fulfilling.

As for how we spend our money, I'd like to see a bit more spent on education. It tends to lower crime rates and reduce rampant bigotry.

Watertowers, your genetic arguements hold no merit. If we had identified a lazy gene or DNA subset, you might have a bit of ground to stand on, but there is no proof for your statements. On the other side, there had been much research showing socio-economic impacts on individuals regardless of visible minority.

Are you suggesting current day Americans are genetically inferior to prior ones? Or are US immigrants lowering the bar? Because the US doesn't have a replacement population birthrate, so the poor can't possible be breeding the nation lazy.

You need only look to Quebec with the Black and Irish populations for ethic/lingistic minorities to even out. Canada doesn't suffer the same economic segregation along race lines as the US; instead Canada stratifies by length of citizenship.

Hmm, now that's an interesting notion. If you consider that wealthy people in the US get better health care than poor people in the US and that black people tend to have less wealth on average, then over time they also receive worse medical care. That would allow members of that population who actually were genetically inferior to simply die and not reproduce as per natural selection while the white population will tend to save more of their genetically flawed individuals.

Medicine above and beyond the home remedies mothers might know has only really been effective for a little over 100 years. That might not be enough time to see an effect, but if we could observe this pattern for a couple thousand years, we might well see a population of relatively fit black people contrasted with a bunch of sickly white idiots--assuming inter-racial relationships are minimal (which they probably won't be).

I would hope the US was able to retify the wage gap in the next 1000 years, so you wouldn't get your selective patterning. However, most people take too simiplistic/straightforward view of evolution. We aren't one uniform blob of code, as individuals, our cells vary in both expression and content. We can receive genetic infusions sideways via virus and bacteria. Recessive/malform gene expressions add heartiness to the species and allows for a stronger genetic match in the future. For example, in einkorn wheat, 'a winter wheat', the genes for cold resistance were introduced via a plant that had substandard yield.

I would set the rise in modern medicine back futher than antibotics (1908) to the discovery of bacteria in 1676. That started modern hygene and world life expectancy has skyrocketed since then from 25-30 to 67. There are 15 countries with a life expenctancy over 80 and 127 countries over 67, 151 over 60, and 18 under 50. Africa drags the average down still due to lack of basically everything we take for granted (peace, utilities, etc).

The US has a life expentency for whites/blacks/all Americans has been 72/64/71 in 1970, 74/68/74 in 1980, 76/69/75 in 1990, 77/71/77 in 2000, and 79/74/78 in 2010. Without exogamy, the prevalence of sickle-cell anemina and STDs in the African American community won't allow their 'better parts' to survive and 'breed quality'. Over 1000 years, if present conditions remained (under replacement birth rate, higher minority morality rates, high Latin and Asian migration), you might see the demographic group disappear entirely.

If you want to be racist, you are better off doing it by haplogroups than skin tones or nationality. For example, Watertowers ascertation that Sweden can be socialist because of their good genes, makes me wonder why Bosnia and Herzegovina, which also have a predominance of Haplogroup I (http://en.wikipedia.org/...on_Haplogroup_I_Y-DNA.svg), does not also have the same luxuries. It may have more to do with the fact of not infighting extensively allows a nation to find stability and prosperity.

Infighting comes from overpopulation issues. Overpopulation issues generally stem from lack of education. I still maintain that Africa contains all genotypes for humanity, and that the average African happens to be black is as superficial as moths in England that changed color in the 19th century from white to black to better camouflage themselves on sooty walls.

Yet it is a fair question to ask why Africa--despite having an advanced ancient civilization in Egypt--is so backward today? I personally doubt the true answer is genetic weakness, but there must be a reason.

Heh, I just wish the US Government would recognize the fact that there is no requirement in our Constitution dictating that we need to export democracy.

We do NOT need to be over there spreading democracy. If they want democracy they should just go about getting it the same way we did and have a revolution, replacing their current form of government with a democratically elected government of their own.

Then they can suffer like we suffer with all the taxes and wasteful spending, etc.

It's a hold over from the 80s and the US attitude of protecting their strategic interests overseas. It's definately not been about exporting democracy.

Look at Panama, Nicaruaga, or Iran for democractically elected governments that the US toppled or destablized. If you want a more recent example, look at Honduras' "coup d'etat" in 2009 and the US reaction.

The US was sending aid to Egypt before their revolution ended 30 years of totalitarian "state of emergency" conditions. The US also supports middling military dictatories like Pakistan. Stability is the more important factor that personal liberty.