9 ms·
Less disease in the world benefits everyone. Very much a social good. It makes me a little sad just reading your criticism.
by Clamchop 2y ago
Less disease in the world benefits everyone. Very much a social good.
It makes me a little sad just reading your criticism.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y agoAt what cost? How much cost should I personally bear to reduce disease worldwide? When we hit a point of diminishing returns do I still need to pay incrementally more into this?
- spaethnl 2y agoOut of curiosity, what cost do you believe that you currently personally bear for this?
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y agoHow much should I bear or how much do I actually bear? I should bear 0 cost. It looks like US Foreign Aid is ~1% of the Fed budget, so 1% of my taxes. So again, too much.
- sangnoir 2y agoHow much would you pay to not get Ebola or another haemorrhagic disease, should it find it's way into your community? How much are you willing to pay to hedge against that risk by squelching outbreaks near the source?
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y agoAbsolutely willing to pay for this. What % of the budget goes to that? Do I need to accept everything else to get this service or can I just whitelist this line item?
- xcrunner529 2y agoUm yes? I am convinced you’re a child with how you think everyone can line pick their own items and only those and somehow that works or would provide enough for the causes lmao. It’s like the people who only wanted 1 or 2 channels and they then realized how much those actually cost without everyone subsidizing.
- ty6853 2y agoYes it's called private services. For instance there are no public roads for miles where I live, so I rented backhoe and made them. There is no police, so I learned how to defend myself. There is no water, so we drilled a well. The whole of public services can be privatized into line items.
- xcrunner529 2y agoUntil you grow up and learn how a neighbor can poison the ground water and you’re fucked.
- sangnoir 2y ago> Do I need to accept everything else to get this service or can I just whitelist this line item? It's a bundled deal, sorry. It's not just governments that avoid admin overheads - no auto insurance I know will let you pick which specific impacts to insure against a la carte, just to reduce your premiums. Also, no 2 people will ever agree on the same government spend (to the nearest million), so I don't see the point of your exercise to personally quantify how ones tax dollars should be directed. The point of having a representative government is so that individual citizens don't need referendum on how much to pay for toilet paper at an USAF base in Japan, or disease reconnaissance in central Africa - but both things benefit US citizens (broadly speaking) and need to be done, so congress allocates the money.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago>It's a bundled deal, sorry. And this is why Trump turned it all off. The bundled deal is not working for too many voters. They want Trump to negotiate a new deal on their behalf.
- Clamchop 2y agoI don't know why you're asking me to answer questions that are clearly personal to you, and have no objective answer. All I can say is, probably not none. And maybe a note on diminishing returns, in that we might want to reflect on the eradication of smallpox and the near total eradication of polio, and what it has meant to you and to your community to not really have to worry about those diseases.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago[flagged]
- cma 2y agoWith RFK you're going to see huge populations of unvaccinated, border control won't help in that scenario with how contagious it is, but immigrants will provide a scapegoat. RFK is probably going to push for removing MMR vaccine requirements for legal immigrants too. His organization got many killed in American Samoa from measles.
- Clamchop 2y agoThere is no upper bound here. The eradication of smallpox is money saved and suffering prevented every day for as long as humans are around. Border screening clearly has a high failure rate, our recent experiences with this should be fresh in your mind. Besides threatening public health domestically, outbreaks in foreign nations are nevertheless a major economic liability. If COVID had never left China, we would still have seen a huge worldwide disruption, for example. And anyway, screw them, we got ours is a shit perspective. Empathy should be part of the conversation when talking about so much suffering and death.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago"No upper bound" is not a serious policy position. Sorry, I can't engage that.
- 2y ago
- mu53 2y agoThe US is the wealthiest country in the world, and the US got to that place by having these programs in place. Who makes shoes/other goods, mines the earth, or other dangerous work? The people in those poor countries. These programs are often the stepping stone that western countries use to enter countries and "develop the economy" in these areas to the benefit of everyone. Developing the economy brings jobs then brings peace. Then the cost of goods stays down. Fewer orphans. More experience treating diseases. More stable economies to exchange goods and services with. Very likely these programs pay for themselves via your taxes via price of goods and services. Entirely ignoring the moral good
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y agoThe US got to this place by winning a world war with virtually no negative impact to our own country. We were literally the last ones standing. All of these programs came after we established our position.
- bamboozled 2y agoAmerica won a world war because Europe, Russia did a lot of the early heavily lifting of and because the USA was already an economic and industrial power?
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y agoEurope and Russia were the ones killing each other and destroying each others' economies. So yeah I guess they did the "heavy lifting".
- bamboozled 2y agoEngland basically destroyed the Luftwaffe and the Soviets took care of most of the Germans during the attempted invasion of Russia. So yeah, I think they did more than their fare share. Are you saying they didn’t ?
- snakeyjake 2y ago>At what cost? $14.03 per American per year.
- xcrunner529 2y agoHe’s just too poor I guess.
- conception 2y agoThe entire foreign aid budget is like 75 bucks an American a year. You probably pay less than that.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y agoOff by an order of magnitude, but even if you were right, it's too much.
- Tostino 2y agoStep back and listen to yourself.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y agoCost is a fundamental part of the human experience. We need to ask that question on every single human action (singular or collective). There are no free lunches.
- Tostino 2y agoA good number of us have said "yeah, that cost seems worth it", and you act like your opinion is the only one that should matter.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y agoIt would appear that more voters think the cost is too high.
- Tostino 2y ago[flagged]
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y agoOf course they didn't know the exact policy mechanism, basically no one did (even well-informed, high-IQ voters). We voted for Trump because he promised massive disruption to the status quo.
- ModernMech 2y ago> basically no one did (even well-informed, high-IQ voters). The policy mechanisms that are coming into play today were the ones proposed in Project 2025. We had been talking about this for months before the election.
- op00to 2y agoAssuming you’re an American, approximately 0.2% of your income goes to healthcare and similar assistance for people outside the US if you pay 20% tax rate.
- ty6853 2y agoIt's turtles all the way down. 0.2% here, 0.2% there, do it 100 times and you save a lot of money. Gutting foreign freebies is an easy starting point, not the end.
- Tostino 2y agoIt's a great way to get rid of the American Empire that we've built up. I mean, you aren't going to like playing second fiddle to China, but that's the choice you are making right now.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y agoThat tracks with what I said elsewhere in this thread, ~1%. It's too much, cut it off.
- bamboozled 2y agoYou get a LOT in return from that, think about how much you benefit from food and other goods made in those countries. Such an ignorant comment.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y agoI actually don't think I get much in return for that.
- lenkite 2y ago> Less disease in the world benefits everyone. Very much a social good. Considering the Covid lab-leak theory has been confirmed now, we can confidently say that paying for disease research in the world causes more disease.
- jyounker 2y agoIt hasn't been confirmed.
- preisschild 2y agoIt literally hasn't been confirmed lmao
- llamaimperative 2y agoFor real. The “I can be trusted with nuance” crowd strikes again! These people are beyond logic.
- bamboozled 2y agoNot confirmed and the fact we do tax payer funded research is what stopped the situation from being worse than it could've been?
- viraptor 2y agoThat's just making things up without the numbers. You'd have to compare all research and all benefits from it to the single event of COVID. Even in the COVID context, Paxlovid effectively came from a British scientist.
- Jerrrry 2y ago[flagged]