Nations Are Not Charities

Trump has already raised many hullaballoos in his few weeks as POTUS-47, and I'm certain he will raise some more. This morning, I am reading about his proposal for an immigration "gold card" (of course it's gold - Trump's tackiness is the stuff of legend) which would allow people to buy themselves a green card for $5M.

My first gut reaction was that this is terribly unseemly.

But, then, I asked myself, "why?" Why would I instinctively reject the idea of inviting wealthy persons into the nation? Other countries do it. And America is already doing it, via the existing EB-5 program.

I realized that I have been lured into the "American benevolence" viewpoint, despite my long-time railing against things like the Pax Americana defense underwriting of Europe's welfare states. ‘We are the rich guy, we should be the one taking care of the poor.”

Except, we are not as rich as that narrative suggests. America's debt-to-GDP ratio is the eleventh worst in the world, and the combination of mis-structured entitlement programs, taxation reality (see Hauser's Law), and lack of political will means that our debt will be going only one direction - up - for the foreseeable future. No matter how well DOGE does its job.

The nation's largesse - to other nations and to some of its citizens - is all being financed by debt. We are the big show-off guy treating everyone else at the dinner table by running up credit card charges we know we cannot pay off.

I had a similar gut-check reaction to Trump's notion of making a mineral rights deal with Ukraine as a recompense for all the billions we've sent them, but again, I stepped back and said "why not?" I've argued since Day 1 that Ukraine-Russia was Europe's making (see: German stupidity) and therefore Europe's responsibility to fund. And, while Europe has indeed put a lot of money (money, not materiel) into Ukraine's war-fighting, I think it should be and have been even more, and America less.

In the bigger picture, the endless debates about foreign aid are often laced with a similar whiff of narrative. As in, helping other nations and other peoples is Good, expecting something in exchange for our largess is Bad. That it's unseemly to expect something in return for the money taken from American taxpayers.

Some globalists and neocons put forth either moral "if not us, who?" arguments, to which I say "with what money??" Moreso, none of our past intercessions have worked as intended... and before you bring up World War II, consider that, had the US not entered World War I, that war would have ended in a stalemate rather than setting the conditions, via the Treaty of Versailles, that fostered the rise of Nazism. But, even that aside, what foreign intervention since then has gone as desired? Had we stayed out of the Kuwait-Iraq mess, I believe that 9/11 and the collapse of the Middle East that flooded Europe with migrants might not have happened. Yes, alternate history is a fraught business, but there is so much historical evidence of failed intercessions that I reject the default "we need to do this" arguments presented whenever more militarism is argued.

Others posit that the goodwill generated by such largess pays its own dividends, to which I say "hah! good luck with that!" Recipient nations are either going to like and side with us for strategic reasons, or they'll tit-for-tat until the -tat dries up, then sell out to whoever else throws money at them. This "goodwill" argument reeks of psychological projection. It's overlaying a personal "moral high ground" onto others with no regard for either the nirvana fallacy element of it or the vastly different cultures in those lands.

We already know that DOGE alone has no chance of getting the nation out from under its growing and crushing (interest payments already exceed the entire military budget) debt. Not that I object to DOGE - every dollar it finds is a dollar's worth of respect to the taxpayers. Entitlement reform - something that sends Congresscritters of both Red and Blue stripes running to the denouncer's microphone - is necessary. I lament that it'll only happen when the system starts to collapse, which will make it more painful.

Continuing to play Daddy Warbucks will only accelerate our economic day of reckoning and sap the time we have to try and remedy or soften it. And, really, what has our lavish dispensing of dollars around the globe gotten us? A tip of the hat to Tennessee Ernie Ford: "Another day older and deeper in debt."