Bankrupting the American Empire

Welfare for dependent dictators will drive the country into financial ruin every bit as fast as welfare for Americans who are unemployed thanks to the Federal Reserve-induced financial crash. A dollar spent is a dollar spent, so there's no gray-area here ... You either support welfare, or you don't.

Missile "shields" in Europe, bought and paid for by American taxpayers, represent nothing more than global "wealth-redistribution." "Policing the world" is welfare too. And direct payments to diabolical tyrants? Evil welfare.

How do evil dictators get rich? Why of course, by sucking money out of hard-working American paychecks!

For 30 years, Americans have been forced to pay the now ousted Egyptian dictator Mubarak some $2 billion per year. Today, at an estimated net worth of $70 billion, Mubarak is the wealthiest man in the world!

Hmmmm ... 2 times 30 equals ... Thanks to American taxpayers, the murdering, torturing, sorry excuse for a human being, Mubarak, is wealthier than a man who actually invented something that improved the lives of billions - Bill Gates.

Now, that's what I call "redistributing the wealth!" Oh, um, er, I mean, "foreign policy." Realpolitik and stuff, dontcha know?

Tea-party traitors

Now, there is no question that most of the grassroots participants in the tea party mean well. Their collective heart is generally in the right place. But, unfortunately, they are nearly as irrational and factually challenged as the left-wingers and liberals they correctly oppose ... they stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that this is also true of spending programs that are justified under the guise of national security, military defense and foreign aid.

Money is fungible, so consider the latter. Even if you believe that it is somehow in the genuine American national interest to send $14.3 billion to the governments of Israel, Egypt, Columbia, Jordan, Pakistan, Peru, Indonesia, Kenya, Bolivia, Ukraine, India, Haiti, Russia, Ethiopia, the Palestine Authority, Liberia, Bangladesh and Bosnia every year, that is $14.3 billion that cannot go to fund the salaries of American soldiers, the educations of American children and unemployment stipends for the out-of-work. As paltry as that $14.3 billion may appear in light of the $1.4 trillion deficit, it is sufficient to cover the average annual Social Security payments for 1.1 million Americans.

So, if it is foolish to take taxpayer money and distribute it to elderly Americans, how can it possibly be wise to distribute it instead to various regimes around the world?

Moreover, once one takes into account the $775 billion spent on the Iraqi occupation as well as the $380 billion spent on the Afghan occupation, it quickly becomes apparent that the cost of playing imperial global policeman is not at all compatible with responsible fiscal governance, let alone small and limited government. Imperial overreach is by no means incompatible with democracy, for as Thucydides chronicled, it was imperial overreach and the invasion of Sicily that precipitated the end of Athenian democracy more than 2,500 years ago.

The Patriot Act votes are only the first in what will eventually come to be seen as a series of systematic betrayals of the tea party by the Republican candidates it backed. It is already eminently clear that the new chairman of the House, John Boehner, has no genuine commitment to either the U.S. Constitution or the small-government principles of those who helped put him into office. For, as we saw during the eight years of the second Bush regime, the differences between Boehner and Pelosi are primarily rhetorical and stylistic rather than substantive.

If you want to cut the budget, you have to cut defense spending and foreign welfare. That means no more Utopian "nation-building" projects, and no more "policing the world."

Anything less and we're simply rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic ...