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So, the U.S. would've had to supply foreign aid for eternity, then? Instead of appreciating the vast sums given by the U.S. and her taxpayers, there's only vitr
by hallole 2mo ago
So, the U.S. would've had to supply foreign aid for eternity, then? Instead of appreciating the vast sums given by the U.S. and her taxpayers, there's only vitriol for the stream of aid money having been cut off.
- friendlyasparag 2mo agoWhat a sad response to the obvious immediate harm done by poorly thought out policy. I thought hackernews was better than this.
- BoggleOhYeah 2mo agoIt’s really not. This place is full of people that never grew past the simplistic ideas of Ron Paul that they fell in love with twenty years ago.
- hallole 2mo agoWhy am I in charge of speaking on behalf of HN? I could certainly be in the minority on this. Must you ensure that every space you enter hold to your exact opinions?
- dc396 2mo agoThis is a troll, right?
- arjie 2mo agoThe steelman argument is that it was the sudden process that people object to. But the steelman against that is that slow processes are used adversarially to prevent action from being taken. In the end, the only people who seem to get outcomes are the ones who rush things. Everyone talked about getting out of Afghanistan and only President Biden did it. The objections were predictably ones against haste. But we’d been in there for a decade past the time we wanted to get out. In this event, considering that most of this aid has not been replaced since by other participants one can only conclude that it would have taken at least this long in a slow rollout. Even an emergency of unbelievable proportions did not incentivize other nations to act. It’s unlikely they would have acted when faced with what looks like yet another austerity project that is going to be inevitably rolled back. In such a universe, if USAID was going, it was only going to go fast. If it wasn’t going to go fast, it was staying. And it’s generally true that people subscribe to the famous Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics. Once we started providing AIDS treatment we were responsible, in their eyes, forever. Given that, I think future charitable efforts should be evaluated in terms of such 50 year costs or so on. To save all the lives that US funding on PEPFAR saved we had to forgo an amount that would domestically have given us CA HSR. I think if you ask most Californians they’d rather have CA HSR than any charity program directed outside so in some respect we are just treating these people as our sin eaters.
- zzrrt 2mo agoThere's the soft power argument that it was actually in US's self-interest to help. And for what it's worth, a lot of the vitriol is from taxpayers who supported that aid.
- dzhiurgis 2mo agoCool. But sometimes it's ok to invest into some hard power.
- zzrrt 2mo agoWell we worked real hard on not changing a regime, not disarming a nuclear power, and not protecting a trade route. How's the investment working out? Maybe if we bomb some more schools they'll be too scared to mess with us.
- zzrrt 2mo agoAlso, even if we prefer hard power, if DOGE were honest or consistent and looked at how we're doing hard power, they would find at least as much fraud and waste as in social and soft power spending.
- glaslong 2mo agoSee and here I thought we were already spending more on our military than the 2nd - 7th highest spending countries combined
- jbs789 2mo agoAmerica’s reputation in the world is not great, and deteriorating. Pulling back for these well-perceived/helpful initiatives while building up (and deploying) military force is not helping. It’s really not a well considered strategy, and the decision makers in Washington could really benefit from a more worldly perspective, imo.
- litoE 2mo agoI'm not rich, but I give a lot of money every year to charity, to try to help those who need help. The United States is the richest country in the world. It was also giving to charity to help those who badly needed help. It was a small amount compared to its budget, and we called it USAID. To protect the money from being scammed by those running the countries we were helping, the US itself administered those programs as much as possible. We know how much Trump donates to charity: bupkis (read about the Donald J. Trump Foundation) and I have a pretty good inkling that Musk donates even less.
- snehk 2mo agoYou're spending your own money. I'm pretty sure that if there was one member of your family that didn't have money for food or medicine, you'd spend it there instead of donating it, wouldn't you?
- netsharc 2mo agoIf only the government thought like this, instead of blaming those family members of being "lazy welfare queens"... A relevant segment on a 2h+ documentary: https://youtu.be/t1MqJPHxy6g?t=1936 https://youtu.be/t1MqJPHxy6g?t=1936 Or before that: https://youtu.be/t1MqJPHxy6g?t=1702 https://youtu.be/t1MqJPHxy6g?t=1702 If you've absorbed the American teaching that "if you just work hard you'll be successful", then you'd have to believe the opposite: "if you're not successful that means you're lazy".
- ShinyLeftPad 2mo agoPeople against usaid should ask basic questions: would US (and therefore its individual taxpayers) be globally wealthy without the rest of the world? does US benefit from disease and death in other countries?
- vunderba 2mo agoExactly. Since 2001, the amount of money we’ve spent on foreign aid is a DROP in the bucket between 0.7% and 1.4% of the federal budget; not much for us - but had an outsized impact on people in the greatest need. It’s helped alleviate poverty, supported disaster relief, and even from a purely US centric motive helped to advanced our own interests by strengthening U.S. soft power abroad. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/06/what-the-data-says-about-us-foreign-aid https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/06/what-the-...
- alexgieg 2mo agoIf the US wants to be the most powerful country in the world, so that if benefits the most from a non-stop flux of wealth moving in from outside, that involves a cost, tiny as it might be. The US decided that paying that cost of $0.10 in exchange for earning $10 was too much. So now it's saving those $0.10, and watching the $10 stop comming in. This is an error all Empires commit a few years before falling from imperial status. As the British, themselves self-inflicted victims of the same mistake, say, penny wise, pound foolish.
- lesostep 2mo agoThat's like helping a grandma to move her groceries, only to throw them on the ground, saying "I didn't sign up to be your carrier for eternity." Like, understandably you could wish to stop helping her. But if you took her groceries to help, you also supposed to place them down gently.
- Gud 2mo agoThat's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it, is that this relatively small amount of money the USA was spending on US AID did amazing things to stabilize the world, which also benefits Americans.
- tencentshill 2mo agoIt used to feel less bad when America caused an incident, because at least we helped people around the world in meaningful ways. Now there's really nothing. There's no underlying moral excuse to support the empire anymore.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]