~~trying to reason with hurricane season~~

[username]

It's all financed with debt, and debt is all that backs our currency. It's hard to buy oil and other resources with debt money when nations have a choice to accept money that isn't debased. BRICS is increasingly providing that choice. The end result is going to be austerity, which is how it always goes for debtor nations.

So what. It doesn’t negate that disaster money is separate from money sent to foreign nations and/or spent on immigration...

The fact that they're separate items in the budget has nothing to do with what sally was getting at. It all gets added to the national debt, which is already well past the point of ever being resolved without going into default.

One of the reasons I’m an independent voter and have voted Republican in some cases in the past is the GOP used to be the party of cutting waste, balancing budgets, reducing the national debt yada yada. That all seems to have gone out the freaking window (Trump certainly didn’t reduce the debt; I don’t think any administration has in ages). Nobody even talks about it anymore. It went way up under Trump and that was before Ukraine and the surge of illegal immigration during the first almost 3 years of Biden. I don’t totally disagree with u on this one but I don’t blame it on Ukraine or illegal immigration. I think we need to take a hard look at SS, Medicare, corporate taxes, tax loopholes used by the wealthy, aid to freaking EVERYONE, how individual states siphon money to satisfy their lobbyists/local constituents and on and on…

I think you'd have to go back to the Republican Party under Eisenhower to see fiscal responsibility. Nixon had to shut the gold window because of the cost of the Vietnam war, and the only Republican I know of that's advocated for reining in the military-industrial complex is Ron Paul. I know the party has that reputation but it's a load of horse manure, just like the notion that Ronald Reagan was an American hero. All they want is to redirect the money spent on social programs to the military. When you take that into consideration, Trump is just another pimple on the pig's patoot, and not at all the biggest one -- not because he's a better person, because of the circumstances surrounding the different administrations.

Again, don’t totally disagree (and I’m not willing to do a data search at this point) but I DO value strong spending on defense and the military. I’m not an isolationist and I feel safer knowing we’re investing a crap ton in our military and hopefully preventing cyber warfare not to mention space defense. I’m also sure that we’re overpaying for everything we’re investing in in that regard which I think is a huge problem.

The other term that I was looking for was pork barrel spending. Bad.

We could definitely do better.