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this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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One of the best uses of my tax dollars in my entire lifetime.
Who doesn't like their tax dollars being spent on killing people instead of socialist stuff like healthcare, education, social workers and government services that actually serve citizens.
The USA could afford what's being provided to Ukraine and socialized benefits. But chooses not to because of some dumb reason or another.
This is the answer. It isn’t a zero sum game.
It's more the hypocrisy of some people. The ones who cheer for a huge defense/foreign aid budget year after year no matter who it's for, and then leave bitchy comments on FB about student loan forgiveness being "unfair" because it uses their tax dollars.
So, in your mind, helping to prevent civilians from dying in a war zone and stopping countries being taken over by foreign powers to be exploited is not a worthy humanitarian effort?
The US is already spending as much federal tax dollars per capita on healthcare as the UK spends on the NHS. Figures that bailing out hospitals when patients invariably default on their debt is expensive: In the US they have tons of people ending up in ER requiring expensive treatment that would've been way cheaper and easier to treat preventively -- but to do prevention you need to be able to afford a doctor's visit. Sure you can stop spending that money but then you either let hospitals go bankrupt, or you have to allow them to reject patients and have them dying on the streets. Even for Americans that's a bit too much.
I don't really have the numbers for education but one big point there is that in the US, education is largely funded by local taxes, that is, schools in low-income areas are severely underfunded, while those in high-income areas are overfunded. If anything it should be the exact opposite, the worst areas need the best schools to lift them up.
But fixing either would cut into corporate profits and/or severely alleviate income equality (and, in the US, thereby, race inequality) so, yeah, don't hold your breath.
First time in my lifetime I've seen the US military might truly used for something good.
Me too. I've opposed every US war that occured in my 50 year life except this one.
Before-the-events, did you think the same about Libya, Afghanistan, or Iraq?
Thanks for replying. This one made me think. I've written a longer response here, https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1022436, the start of which is not intended to be passive aggressive. I just wanted to frame it so as to deal with the issues rather than your personal interpretation.