The actual spend on foreign aid? Under 1%.
Americans are systemically and catastrophically disinformed. Expecting us to be able to assess the real impact of the DOGE team's fuckups is a violation of GIGO.
Also in the context of federal budget, 1% is a huge number since most of the budget (like social security, interest payments, and Medicaid) is non negotiable.
~30B a year (USAID budget) is enough to make improvements domestically, e.g free college for 10% of students, transportation, housing, etc.
Should China be left alone on the world stage to take over?
if only that's what they would spend it on. Instead, it's going to go to the military.
Look at the role of USAID during the Vietnam War under CORDS. It funded the "strategic hamlet" program which uprooted rural civilians into barb wire enclosures and provided arms and training to militia.
That doesn't sound like international aid.
Look at the Phoenix Program during the same war. It was an intelligence program which sough to identify "VC infrastructure" within rural villages and "capture or kill".
One can argue that such activities are beneficial to the US, but claiming it's soft and cuddly "international aid" for countries in need is just not accurate.
Providing HIV assistance while undermining political stability is a high price for other countries to pay and I'm sure is a net negative for them.
You're taking that as a prior when in reality US FoPo prefers political stability after the Cold War. You need to get a grip here if you're seeing everything through the lens of dubious paranoia, if not just leftist resentment.
I should rephrase that to "political instability with regards to the perspective of locals".
I agree the US is seeking "political stability" with these activities. But it's on US terms which is often in direct opposition to the locals.
And I'd argue my view is not "dubious paranoia". The purpose of USAID is to use development activities as a cover for interference in other country's politics.
The general public's understanding of soft power, a global economy, and maintaining an economic hegemony is just not there. We have a democratic Republic because our founding fathers were smart enough to realize the general public is not smart enough (or, doesn't have the time to) rule on every issue.
Maybe - maybe - a merry band of lily-white slave-owners born hundreds of years before solar power and social media don't know how best to run a modern government.
And maybe we'd be smarter if our government didn't treat schools as a pipeline to factory work, or as a means to make billions from crippling and predatory student loans. "I love the uneducated", etc.
One must also keep in mind that the man of the 18th century achieved the necessary milestones to become a self-sufficient adult by his late teens. He will have already lived a full life at the age his 21st century counterpart crosses the starting line.
And absolutely, rational and knowledgeable is certain. But we seem to treat their edicts as the height of infallible perfection in government, and view it as anathema to even suggest ideas that don't precisely align with their statements.
really? i tried sourcing this and I can see there were only two in their 20s (26 each) out of 56. no teenage. 2 in 20s, 17 in 30s, 12 in 40s, 9 in 50s, 6 in 60s, and 1 in 70s (well, 70 exact - Benjamin Franklin).
"As it turns out, many Founding Fathers were younger than 40 years old in 1776 ... more than a dozen of them were 35 or younger."
Peter Salem was the youngest signatory at 16.
Alexander Hamilton, 21. Thomas Lynch, Jr, and Edward Rutledge, 26. George Walton, 27, and Thomas Heyward, Jr, 29.
That being said, I take the National Archives as a more authoritative source than a Slate article!
I made no such claim, but since you mention it, populism thrives when political power is perceived as disconnected to the common people. You can look up any number of stats on that yourself; they're quite clear that we are in a historic low [0].
What I did claim was that the problems and potential of our day couldn't have been foreseen by the 'founding fathers', so it's silly to hold them as _the_ shibboleth of democratic ideals. I would even say that the more accurate term for them would be the 'colonizing great great great etc grandfathers', which puts things back into perspective a little.
And even so; they explicitly warned that their system wouldn't hold up forever, needed continuous adjustment, and would need some rather extreme 'refreshing' from time to time.
I'm asking in retrospect to the overall well-being on the nation in actual policies and results, not in it's political dominance. As recently as the Cultural Revolution we can see what happens the excesses of the mob are released.
>What I did claim was that the problems and potential of our day couldn't have been foreseen by the 'founding fathers', so it's silly to hold them as _the_ shibboleth of democratic ideals
Well I think you're attacking a strawman here, there will be situtations where their writings are not so relevant, but this situation of populism very much falls into category where their writings are relevant and specfically designed to anticipate for.
If you don't believe that, well then explain what are your alternative solutions to populism and if they are more poltically viable than what the founders proposed. I suspect if you weigh them all, the founders' ideals will come out on top.
Don't underestimate history, don't think you are really that different from our past. Plato might have lived 2000 years ago, but we still influenced by him today precisely due to the timeless quality of his ideas. Same as the Founders, you might disparage them for slavery that was common at the time, but their sincere devotion to republican ideals were acts of extraordinary moral upstanding that were rare both then and today. That's why we greatly respect them, not just in USA but around the world.
Are you familiar with Nicaragua's history? Iran's? Italy, Guatemala, Congo? Chile, Argentina, El Salvador? Brazil, Honduras, Haiti? Bolivia? ...
Internally, are you familiar with the history of gerrymandering? Voter suppression? Disinformation campaigns? The fight against campaign finance reform, or against winner takes all voting? Ballot access laws? Legislative and judicial manipulation against third parties and progressive candidates? Debate exclusion across corporate media, unchallenged smears, media blackouts, expensive lawsuits...
It may be the best of all bad plans. But it clearly does not succeed in producing compromises. At the very least it relies on some kind of good will between constituents. When you lose that you no longer have a nation.
The point of a Republican democracy is so the public doesn’t have to decide the best way to build warships. But what values America should spend its money supporting absolutely are what should be decided by the democratic process.
At the scale of organizations and business, it's probably the most important tool you need to learn if you want to be at all effective. I've never seen a manager who was able to actually "get things done" who didn't skillfully wield soft power. The least effective managers I've worked beside needed to constantly resort to the use of authority and/or bullying to achieve results.
Which also generally pisses off lots of people. Then again some people seem to get a kick out of pissing off others.
It's quite reasonable to assume that a similar dynamic works at larger scales also.
E.g. Biden’s “human rights” push in Bangladesh. How did it help America to undermine the government’s ability to kill Islamists? It didn’t. It simply was ideologically captured Americans wanting to export their value system and use public dollars to do so.
This is a cynical, but accurate definition of soft power: exerting your will using words.
Your argument is all over the place - you call soft power a "fake concept", and then "bullshit", and here, you seem to suggest that it works, but you don't agree with Biden ideologically? So which is it?
Soft power and hegemony absolutely played vital roles since the end of WW2. We seem to have forgotten how much everything relied on them.
For the record, I don't like American foreign policy, and USAID is basically the CIA in disguise. But in terms of furthering America's goal of being the dominant power in the world, it absolutely works, and is _much_ more financially efficient than the cost of military intervention to establish supremacy.
I don't know even where to begin. I hope it's trolling.