Comment by runako | Hacker News Reader

Comment by runako | Hacker News Reader

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> when funds are scarce

The US budget is ~$7T annually. There is $50B to spend deporting critical parts of our workforce. There is $1T in defense spending to ensure that we spend more than the next 9(!) militaries combined*. Et cetera.

The US spends ~$18B supporting UN programs. This is ~0.003% of the federal budget.

The point here is funds are not scarce, and in any case to the extent that one is concerned about spending, the UN spend is not the driver. The rest of your point is consistent, there's no need to use the red herring about lack of money.

* I'm old enough to remember the end of the Cold War. Americans were told that as the Soviet threat withdrew, we could expect a "peace dividend" now that we didn't need to spend so much on defense. Inflation-adjusted, we spend more now than at the peak of the Cold War.

Given the threat matrix today that includes fantasies such as "US land war against its third-largest trading partner" and the absurd "protracted war against a developing nation currently being fought to stalemate by a country smaller than California," I am not sure this increased spend makes sense. Seems like the only scenario that justifies our military spend is when a President decides to blow a wad of lives & cash in some utterly wasteful conflict.

The US ran a $1.8T deficit in 2024. That's objectively scarce funds. Even if the UN doesn't drive a significant portion of the spending, they do not serve the people that are going into debt to fund it.

The US just signed a new law that will expand the deficit further. (I'll leave as an exercise to determine whether the increase from the law is > or < than the UN spend.) Your argument would have more purchase had not the administration committed to many years of larger deficits only a few weeks ago.

A government that does not collect sufficient taxes to fund its priorities can somehow always claim that funds are scarce. But that's a) a choice and b) can be rectified any time by shifting priorities (see: military budget, for ex.) or collecting more revenue.

It's fine to say "I don't care that there is a body where nations can defuse conflict without war," but it's disingenuous to pretend there simply is not money for it.

I still intellectually can't parse the argument: yeah, we're in debt therefore it's fine to spend on stuff we don't need.

If you're ok with increasing debt to fund UN (and thousand other things) then come out and say so.

BTW: I would love to hear which wars did UN stop?

It seems to me that recently US, not UN, stopped Houthis from bombing ships, stopped India-Pakistan conflict, derailed Iran's nuclear plans and is making progress on Israel-Palestine conflict.

All I hear from UN is pro-palestine, anti-israel virtue signaling and zero action or even a realistic plan to help end those conflicts.

> If you're ok with increasing debt to fund UN (and thousand other things) then come out and say so.

Yes. I am okay with increasing debt (currently costing 2% after inflation) to increase long-term US stability and competitiveness. I am not okay with increasing debt to decrease long-term US stability and competitiveness, as we are doing now.

- nobody was endorsing the OBBBA or saying that it’s good.

- some spending is objectively more necessary than other spending. Funding UNESCO is not that important. I detailed why we shouldn’t do so even were we running a $1T budget in another comment.

- UNESCO is not responsible for “defus[ing] conflict without war.” The vast majority of the UN is not.

OBBA is important context because it was just enacted this month and it demonstrates clearly that the deficit and debt are not political priorities. Any argument put forth by the administration that enacted the OBBBA concerning debt is transparently facile given its demonstrated actions of increasing the rate of increase of the debt.

It's fine to say we should not participate in the UN/UNESCO for ideological reasons, but we don't have to take leave of our faculties and engage with the silly notion that this administration cares about the debt or deficit.

No, they obviously aren’t. I don’t think we’ve had an administration or congress that cares one bit in my living memory.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to quit supporting removal of pointless spending any more than it means I’ll support the OBBBA. I’m not going to adopt a sunk-cost fallacy that “well, they just pissed away even more money, so throwing the UN a few billion to further chicom propaganda and political narratives I oppose is fine.” That’s not a facile position.

I agree it’s not going to make a huge difference in the debt but we don’t have the money to burn. The fact that congress and the president ignored that doesn’t make it less true or compel me to do so for this case. There isn’t this bargaining thing happening where trump’s OBBBA pisses away trillions more therefore now it’s acceptable to piss away billions on anti-american global organizations.

I think the parent post was saying the money is not well spent, not that the US can't afford it. We could clearly throw a lot more at the UN, but that would just be doubling down on a bad investment. At least thats how I read it - better to just pull the plug.

The U.S. is $35 TRILLION in DEBT. It's on a fast path to very high inflation which will be bad for everyone.

U.S. can't afford $18 billion of non-essential spending. It can't afford $1 billion of non-essential spending. In fact, it can't afford $1 of non-essential spending.

The argument "we're $35 trillion in debt so it's not a big deal to add 0.01% to it" is just incomprehensible to me.

And it's not just UN. It's $47 billion to USAID, $9 billion to NPR, $10 billion to California's "never gonna happen" rail, $1.3 billion to Harvard and that's just a small part of spending.

US government still needs to go on a serious spending diet. But every cut gets people to catastrophize how the world will end if US doesn't fund UN or Harvard.

This is true and correct, but none of it will matter if we keep letting the olds bleed the last drops from our country and continue pissing away the majority of our budget on social security and medicare. Until those are gone and the majority of the federal budget thereby removed, this remains an intractable problem.

What’s the counter to the standard “nation-states do not run like family budgets, especially when the nation-state is the global hegemon”? Or “Owe your banker £1,000 and you are at his mercy; owe him £1 million and the position is reversed.”?

That at every point in the past and almost certainly in the future, global hegemons don't stay that way once their currency is sufficiently devalued and no longer held as the reserves of other nations.

As here, is often ignored are two levers available to resolve our debt.

> The argument "we're $35 trillion in debt so it's not a big deal to add 0.01% to it"

This is not the argument. The argument is more along the lines that our leadership just weeks ago rallied around a sharp increase in the rate of our debt accretion, so obviously erasing the debt is not a political priority at this time.

Given that erasing the debt is not a political priority, good stewardship demands that deficit spending should align with uses that will generate positive long-term financial returns to Americans (e.g. cancer research) instead of negative returns (deporting agricultural and construction workforces).

Making cuts that will have the effect of slowing the long-run growth rate of the US economy and its overall competitiveness will also make it harder to erase the debt should that ever become a political priority.

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