Us or Them

Congress finally passed a temporary budget to get us through a few more weeks. As you probably know, the hold up was in funding FEMA. Some Conservatives wanted to offset funding emergencies with cuts in spending. Liberals argued that it wasn't fair to withhold much needed money to hurricane or tornado victims while Congress debated where the money should come from and which budgets to cut.

Surprisingly, I agreed with the liberals. Although I think government should have a limited role in our lives, we do need help during disasters. However, I also partially agree with conservatives in that we must have offsetting spending cuts to pay for it. The issue, however, is where we should cut our spending. Conservatives want to take money from green energy. I wouldn't mind cutting spending on that but this isn't the time or place. No, there is a much better area to cut spending to fund FEMA. The next time there is an emergency requiring federal assistance conservatives should ask the following question:

Do we provide billions in assistance to Americans in need or do we continue to provide the same amount to Pakistanis? I picked Pakistan as it's been in the news but you could substitute it for nearly any other country. Hell, we seem to give your money to just about everybody but you. If curious here is the listing of how much we gave other countries as of 2009: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s1296.pdf

Why do we give $7 million to Ireland? Nice people but let England take care of them. Does anybody know where Kyrgyzstan is for we gave that country $43 million! In 2009 we gave over $11 trillion to the Middle East including that $1.2 trillion to Pakistan and $8.6 trillion to Afghanistan plus another $1.7 trillion to Egypt. Then there was the $1.2 trillion the US gave to Columbia in 2009. Why? And on top of all this largess is the copious amounts of your hard earned money goes to the United Nations. In 2009 we gave $589 trillion to this institution which takes our money while it frequently denounces our country, our ideals

We can't continue to do both, not in the current economic situation. And to add insult to injury, far too many of the countries we help would cheer to see our citizens in trouble. In fact they would be more inclined to assist in the United States downfall then to lend us a helping hand. So the question is as simple as do we help our own citizens or do we help some other country while our citizens go in need?


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