On Relief

[hkellick]

It's interesting. There's been a lot of hub bub about the fact that many countries across the world are contributing to the effort to help out in Southeast Asia, including the U.S.A. What makes this interesting is that there's a great deal of criticism that the U.S., the richest nation in the world (?), is not giving as much as they could.

My first response is "Of course not. We can't even afford to put proper armor on our soldiers."

Until it struck me.
Maybe the U.S. isn't half as rich as we'd all like to think.

No, seriously. I know it goes against common sense and what you read about, but what if the U.S. is hurting and trying not to show it.
We went to war, but we can't afford to give our soldiers good armor, good health care etc.
It doesn't seem to be going towards making sure the intelligence we're gathering overseas is better.
Most of our education reforms are badly underfunded. Hell, most of our schools are badly underfunded.
Even George Bush has said that Social Security is in trouble.
We are running the biggest national debt we've ever run. Ever.

So.. seriously.. here's the question. Where's the money? What's the money drain?
Sure, it could be the tax breaks. We're definately losing money there.
It could be the war. I understand very little about where money going towards "The war effort" really goes. It's obviously NOT to the common soldier.

Where *IS* the money?

I have no idea what the answer is. I'd definately like to know the answer, though.

Comments

[mythagon.livejournal.com]

The US is extremely rich, but the money is not necessarily in the government. Our GDP is twice that of the next closest nation (China), but I think a lot of the cash is in the hands of very very few people. Think of how many actors and business leaders and CEO's are worth obscene amounts of cash. Sure, they are all over the news all the time, but in proportion to the rest of the country, we're talking about less than 1% of the US population. Together they could probably pay off the national debt a few times over, but I don't think they ever would. I wouldn't were I that rich. I've seen how the government handles cash.

A note about the giving: the one thing that other nations are not taking into account with their aid calculations is the individual contributions. In a lot of European countries, they are taxed significantly higher then we are giving their governments more cash to play with (and they get things like universal healthcare and good education systems in return). The average US citizen isn't taxed as much, so we have more personal wealth. I think the majority of US aid is going to come from people on their computers clicking the 'donate with paypal now!' buttons. How you track that I have no idea, but I bet it will be significant.