Aid to Islamic Countries is a Sucker Bet

Since the year of my birth in 1946, my country has given the following Middle Eastern countries (Islamic countries) the following amounts of money:  Egypt $114 billion; Iraq $59 billion; Pakistan $52 billion; Afghanistan $49 billion; Iran $13 billion; Lebanon $3.4 billion; Syria $2.2 billion; Yemen $2.1 billion; Libya $1.5 billion.  I do not believe that this money has been well spent.   But that is just the beginning of my discontent.                       

            Remember that a stack of one dollar bills a million dollars high would be the height of the average man.  A billion dollars would be taller than the Gateway Arch in St. Louis!  A billion is a whole lot of money.  So let’s try to get this money down per capita numbers, which are readily understandable.  Nobody knows what a billion dollars buys, but we all know what $1510 buys.  Per capita is tricky only in the insistence that it includes all people in the identified group.  When we talk about, “per capita” in the United States we do not mean every tax payer, or even every adult, we mean every human being. So if you are part of a family of four, multiply accordingly.

How would you feel if I told you that your family pays $1510.86 per person every single year just to fund the top 25 foreign aid recipients of the United States largesse?  How would you feel if I told you that almost 2 of every 3 dollars of your dollars go to Muslim nations?  How would you feel if I told you that despite those billions in aid most Arab citizens have an unfavorable view of America and these countries routinely vote against the US interests in the United Nations?  Now, the really important question:  To which country would you give this $1510.86 if you were given a choice in the matter? 

Make no mistake; it isn’t the money I am talking about.  My husband and I give better than this per capita amount to charities of our choosing each year, on top of the tax burden that we share with everyone else.  But the choice is ours:  the church, UNESCO, American Indian relief, CLIMB, Wyoming, American Juvenile Diabetes Association...(fill in the blank with the cause of your choice).  My point is that I will not allow someone to play me for a sucker and continue to pay for the privilege.  We have been bending over backwards for too many countries and they have responded by sticking it to us in the exposed spot.

ENOUGH!

While I would love to have each of us indicate on our IRS forms which foreign nation to which our aide share should go, I know this will never happen.  So instead let’s try something equally radical.  All foreign aide, to every country, goes to zero.  The amount allocated for that aid stays the same, but to whom it is allocated is up for grabs based on—wait for it—how happy them make us.  If these countries are going to act like a kept woman, they better start acting like one.  They better start forking over. 

What if we had a scale for allocating aid?  Voting with us in the United Nations counts.  Giving us aid against someone we declare an enemy (ISIS, Al Qaeda, the list of Islamic sociopaths goes on…) counts.  Giving aid and comfort to our enemies reduces the amount.  But there is no more any such thing as a free ride.  If you want our money, give us something in return.  If you don’t like it, take your supplicant ass to Putin.

Earn our support and keep the faith.