Risky Take: Foreign aid at the cost of survival

The tragic truth of where the money goes.

Photo by Connor Betts on Unsplash

As the world moves into a more uncertain state, between pandemics, wars, terroristic attacks on sovereign nations we are plagued with the question. How are we being taken care of by our leaders in power? Obviously we pay enormous amounts of money in taxes to ensure our safety and wellbeing, in fact we even give our hard earned and taxed dollars to foreign countries in an attempt to ensure the problems stay abroad.

There is an exceptionally long history of nations with power doing just this, sending money instead of sending troops. Sending supplies instead of sending bodies. Intrinsically this would be a proxy war, war without being at war. This level of political decision is often the ‘safe’ bet when the world is falling apart around you, so to maintain a proper military might you sacrifice monetary funds to support those abroad. This ensures that the discourse stays abroad while you maintain a minimal footprint of involvement, allowing your nation to gather intelligence and setup resources to ensure that should real involvement be required. It means you are well on the prepared side, and your inevitable opponent is already in a weakened state. Sadly this does not appear to be the situation this time.

Though this strategy has a history of working, never in the history of it has a nation sacrificed its own peoples well being like it has been used today. The money it would seem that we are collecting through taxation, is simply too much. And the guise of where those funds are going, which is said to be back into our own nation, is in fact, making its way abroad to aid in foreign discord. Simply put, these funds which should be used to support us are are not.

Photo by Kony on Unsplash

Now we are hearing that the military will be taking a budget cut, amidst funding foreign wars all while over taxing our own people under the guise of new boons with our tax dollars. Which begs the question, why is it that this is happening? And why is the military expected to sacrifice its budget for foreign entities. The answer is probably more complicated than we can ever ascertain without being the actual decision makers. Yet our feelings on this appear ever more validated on a daily basis. This is simply ill informed decision making. Budgets don’t balance themselves, and yet it appears the government is treating the people, and the military, like a piggy bank for foreign aid.