So, Nick Kristoff is crying about USAid, and I agree, mostly:
I’m hearing from experts around the world about what the destruction of USAID is meaning: “a global health massacre,” in the words of a doctor who has devoted her life to humanitarian work on the front lines. Millions of malnourished children left to starve. Pregnant women not getting micronutrients to prevent neural tube defects. Programs against schistosomiasis abandoned. HIV positive patients left without ARV’s. Water no longer purified. Surveillance against Ebola and bird flu set back. TB patients unable to get medicine. I’ve long argued that USAID should be reformed, but this Trump/Musk demolition is cruel and incompetent and benefits China, while killing children just as wonderful as our own.
It’s worth reading the replies to this. The usual one is “we have lots of homeless and sick people, we should take care of them first.” Trump’s budget cuts 400 billion to Medicaid, to pay for tax cuts for rich people who have more than enough. MAGAts are delusional cultists.
USAid is skeezy in many ways: lots of nasty intelligence shit hidden there, but it also does a lot of good, and the price tag is trivial. If you want to house and feed and give healthcare to Americans, cut the defense budget, raise taxes on billionaires, and get on with it. It’ll even be good for the economy.
Americans aren’t homeless and sick because of foreign aid, they’re homeless and sick because for 45 years all the money has gone to rich people and they’ve jacked up the price of homes and healthcare, and gotten rid of millions of good jobs. That’s all.
This has been a bipartisan project. Democrats hands are not clean. I remember Clinton’s massive welfare cuts and Obama helping banks literally steal people’s homes with fraudulent documents as two of thousands of possible examples. But anyone who thinks Trump wants to fix this rather than accelerate it is so delusional they should be in an asylum.
I have no patience left, none, for either Democrats or Republicans. All of you are monsters who have hurt the weak, destroyed the middle class and made millions of Americans homeless while denying them healthcare. You’re all monsters.
America has always had enough wealth to feed and care for all Americans and even help a lot of foreigners, but the entire project since Reagan has been to make the rich richer, and fuck everyone else. Anyone who says otherwise is lying or delusional & a piece of human garbage.
America is a shithole because that’s what both Democrats and Republicans wanted, and it’s what they worked hard for.
Every time an off-ramp was offered, and there was almost always someone running in Democratic Presidential primaries who was against this, they were crushed. Usually the number of primary votes they received was so small as to be a joke. Democratic primary voters wanted what has happened. So did Republicans.
Welcome to the America you voted for, again and again.
Jefferson Hamilton
The “we should take care of our own homeless first” argument, almost universally, only comes out when spending money on some other country’s poor is on the table. Any other time, there is either conspicuous silence or a “we should bulldoze them into the sea” attitude. Americans love looking like they give a shit but don’t actually think of the American destitute as people.