How about $1 billion in incentives to research natural medicines? Something you seem passionate about
Interstate highway system?
Advancing science by exploring our solar system?
And helping countries in need (not $1 billion, but if it were bad enough…)
It’s not about the topic. It’s not about directing that $1billion to something I’m passionate about.
I wouldn’t vote for programs of that size on ANY topic. I stand by what I said. No programs of that size can be managed effectively without extreme likelihood of inefficiency, waste, fraud, and grift.
Break it down into rational sizes, and I’ll go to bat for those I think worthy programs.
Spend taxpayer money in the billion-dollar denomination? Nope. I don’t see anything that tells me you aren’t wasting chunks in the million-dollar denomination as part of it.
The unscrupulous would just get around this by keeping individual amts below the $1 billion and instead state $999 million etc
Thus, ALL foreign aid should END
ALL money should be kept for and only used for Americans. We need to fix our country’s issues first & strengthen our foundation.
End ALL help given to illegals. Use our American money on Americans ONLY then we’d have plenty to keep the programs running & be able to raise the limits to include more Americans in the programs. American money should help America & Americans first & foremost.
Before helping foreigners, America should NOT have any homeless, especially homeless vets. All vets shouldn’t have to jump thru hoops for nothing. They served our country, our country owes them. America should NOT have starving people especially children & elderly. The mentally ill shouldn’t be thrown out on the streets.
I can go on and on. But, you u get the drift.
I think there is a reasonable case to provide foreign aid under some LIMITED circumstances. Natural disasters may be one, and military aid to a VERY LIMITED set of CONTRACTED ALIES with mutual defense agreements AND capability is another. For example, if we have a mutual-aid agreement with GB - where they’d send military aid if we were attacked, and we send aid if they are - with some very tight controls on maximum $$ and line-item visibility to the public, and gets voted on by the citizens - that might be reasonable.
That being said, there’s a VERY LONG LIST of things that money should go to for Americans first.
One way to manage this might be to create an inventory of American projects that need to be completed FIRST before dollars can be used for foreign aid. These might be bucketed by $$ per project. For example:
$50 million to 100 million:
$10 million to 49 million:
$1 million to 9 million:
If you want to send $50 million to foreign aid, first you have to have finished all the projects in the $50 million bracket. If there’s any unfinished projects in there, the $50 million goes to that project first.
They already have a secure enough program for representatives to vote remotely on bills. GIVE THAT TO US and we tell them how to vote.
This is essentially direct democracy. This sounds great on the surface but suffers in practice. That’s why the founders created a representative democracy instead. The problem is that there are too few representatives to truly represent the will of their enormous districts. We need to lift the restriction on the size of the House of Representatives so that you can actually voice your concern to your representative and be heard. The founders wanted House members to represent 30,000 people. Today they represent over 700,000.
Any and all aid to foreign countries should be put to
a nationwide vote and you must be a taxpayer to vote on these issues.