Thomas Massie (R-KY) Doesn't Want to "Bankrupt Our Country?"

A day or two ago, the Palestinians in Gaza, under the leadership of Hamas, attacked Israel.  Israel vigorously attacked back, and their leader claims it's his aim essentially to destroy the Gaza Strip.  There has been worldwide reaction to the Palestinians' attack, and some discussion as to what, if anything, the US should do about it.

Representative Massie holds a policy that he recognizes will seem "extreme" to some, and it is "no foreign aid."  He doesn't make clear if he means he objects to the $3.5B in aid this country already gives to Israel on a yearly basis, or if he's just referring to the extra $1B some legislators have proposed adding, under these new and sudden circumstances.

But Representative Massie makes his underlying intention clear: he argues that if some think his "no foreign aid" position is "extreme," "it's extreme to bankrupt our country and put future generations of Americans in hock to our creditors."  If it was that simple, I can't imagine that anyone would disagree with him.  But it's not that simple.

Israel was founded in 1948 as a reliable refuge for Jews, after the end of WWII.  That part of the world was not the only possible refuge considered, but it was the one that was chosen.  There were people living there -- Palestinians, like the "Native Americans" who lived here when the colonists wanted someplace other than England to live -- and those people were displaced to make room for a Jewish state.  And ever since then -- every year -- the United States has provided lots of the "foreign aid" to which Representative Massie says he objects.  For the moment, let's hold that thought.

Every year, always, the Pentagon requests a highly inflated budget.  Many, or perhaps most, years, they're given even more than they requested.  And I've read several articles about armaments (jet fighters, etc) that don't even work, even though we paid a highly inflated price for them.

At the same time, every recent Republican president has lowered taxes, almost exclusively to benefit the rich, who have no use for the money anyway, and the two most recent Democratic presidents have carefully avoided that "third rail."  The Pentagon's budget is our largest expense, and we agree, seemingly by presidents of both parties, not to forego funding the budget we lavish on the Pentagon.  Unfortunately, in a pattern that smells like massive hypocrisy, we then complain about the deficit.

So, we construct a fiscal structure that compromises Americans, people like Massie don't complain about it, but he then cries crocodile tears over the idea of bankrupting the country to address a problem that we took an important role in causing.  (It's true Hamas has never accepted the existence of Israel, which they should by now, but the Israelis have been relentless in attacking the Palestinians, and trying to obliterate them.  And the US has always provided unflinching and unquestioning help to them.)

But getting back to Massie's argument, and the title of this post, it is frankly screamingly disingenuous to unload (waste) massive amounts of money on the Pentagon, sometimes for warmaking equipment that doesn't work, and completely voluntarily run up an increasingly massive deficit about which everyone complains (by giving tax cuts to people who don't need them, at the expense of everyone else), but at the same time to whine about what Massie calls bankrupting our country.  All we would have to do is tax people who are merely selfish, and wouldn't be remotely bankrupted, or even miss the money, and this whole complaint evaporates.  And we could help ourselves further by stopping dumping meaningless and useless amounts of money on the Pentagon, which didn't ask for it, doesn't need it, and can't responsibly use it.  It is of note that the Pentagon has for years been unable to pass an audit.  They collect all this money, that people like Massie don't want to spend, and that the Pentagon mis-spends, and they can't even account for it.

So, if Massie doesn't want to bankrupt this country, I have some very easy suggestions for him.  And getting serious about real peace negotiations in the Middle East would most certainly be on the list.