U.S. Spending

What exactly is the US relationship with other countries where treaties are involved and contributions have to be made. There is a lot of this in the news lately and some say we are only paying our fair share and others say we are being taken advantage of. I guess we should begin by looking at our contributions to the United Nations and what others are paying. There has been so much controversy over the United Nations from time to time we should examine what we are paying. It doesn’t help the image of the United Nations when UN representatives who have diplomatic immunity do things others would be arrested for. Many also park their cars anywhere on the streets of New York without regard for traffic congestion.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, the United States was funding twenty percent of the entire budget of the United Nation in 2016. That came to ten billion dollars. There are 193 members in the United Nations and each member has an assessed contribution and our is by far the biggest. Costs are divided among different administrative costs and some programs and the United States paid between twenty-two percent and twenty-eight percent of the program costs. These funds are also used for the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Trade Organization. There are also programs which require voluntary contributions to keep them going such as The United Nations Children’s Fund known as UNICEF and the World Food Program known as WFP. We voluntarily contributed six billion dollars to the UN and paid four billion for our assessment.

According to the Website Factly Japan contributed 9.68 percent of its Gross Domestic Income or GDI to the UN, China 7.91 percent, Germany 6.389 percent, France 4.859, the United Kingdom 4.463 percent and Brazil 3.823 percent. These are the six highest contributors outside of the United States. Factly claims the United States pays more than the twenty percent quoted above and the figure is really twenty-two percent. The point is two-fold. First are we paying for bloat where people from foreign countries are getting cushy jobs with little or no accomplishments and second are we paying too much. I can’t help but think both are true. I think eventually we will see our contributions go down. They have been reduced first in 2017 by $285,000,000 and the same in 2018. This is a start but it doesn’t go far enough.

There has been a lot said about NATO lately. NATO stands for North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Members of the organization signed a pact which states if one of the NATO countries is attacked it is an attack against all and all will respond. This was great when it was first formed in 1949. The founding member states of NATO are Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the United States. Later other countries joined. They were Greece, Turkey, West Germany, Spain then the reunified Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania. Russia was turned down. Whether you think we should be protecting these countries or not is for a different discussion. I am interested in the NATO budget right now. Recently the president announced he has gotten all the NATO partners to promise to pay their two percent of their annual GDP. In 2016 NATO spent $920 billion on defense and guess who paid most of it? We did to the tune of 70 percent according to the Council on Foreign Relations. This makes us the world’s biggest suckers. No wonder the president wants to reduce our payments. There is no doubt we have to lower these payments and get them to be much fairer. Why should the U.S. which is in debt up to its eyeballs be paying for the rest of the NATO members? I am not saying they all are ducking their payments, but many must be.

When we figure foreign aid, there are two ways to figure the amounts out. One way logically is who gives the most money, the other way is what country gives the biggest percentage of its GDP. There is no doubt the United States gave the most publicly, about 50 billion dollars but some say there was far more given secretly to some countries. We may never know the extent of the true amount of the aid we give according to some people. As of 2016 the most generous countries in order of their monetary donations were the United States, Germany, the UK, France, Japan, Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, Canada and the UAE. If we look at the most generous countries by percentage of Gross National income we see something different. They are in order of their donations. Sweden, UAE, Norway, Luxembourg, Denmark, the Netherlands, UK, Finland, Turkey, Switzerland and Germany. Does this mean we should be giving more or we are just hiding a lot of our donations?

There is no doubt the United States spends a lot of money in its endeavors which is not counted. Take for example all the money we sent to Iraq and Afghanistan and much of it disappeared. I don’t believe this was counted as aid, but I guess I could be wrong. We are good at giving away money and losing track of it. Nothing proves this more than the deficit in our military budget. There is said to be 21 TRILLION dollars unaccounted for. A lot of people believe it was really used for a secret space program among other things but even if it was it represents unparalleled secrecy and incredible lack of control over spending. It is time we managed all our spending in every area and hold people accountable for what they spend.

How do we know these huge deficits are not caused by theft? We don’t and sadly they have been going on for more than a generation. President Kennedy said free countries abhor secrecy and we have more of it in this country lately than we have ever had. Politicians think it is okay to hide every important thing they do and many times it is because they know what they are doing is against the will of the American people. We have to start by not letting other countries take advantage of us, reign in the secret military spending and spend money wisely. Can you imagine if you ran your home’s budget the way the government runs its budget? You would be bankrupt in no time.

If some of our spending came to light I am sure it would be stopped immediately. We also have to stop this absurd passion to make everything secret and kept it from the public.