Revolutionary aid

Republicans on the hill are currently debating the best way to cut budgets across the bureaucratic spectrum. They are proposing a 16 percent cut to the State Department’s budget and a 41 percent cut to humanitarian programs.

Our national debt sits somewhere around $14 trillion, so there is an obvious need to get spending under control. However, reducing the State Department’s budget right now would be detrimental to our ability to help countries around the world, hurt our reputation and endanger our national security.

Revolutions are raging like tire fires across the Muslim world; we are at a critical time when the United States needs to look and do our absolute best. Everything our country has worked for since 9/11 is coming to a head. Cutting foreign aid would cripple us and our current and future allies.

This would be okay for some Republicans that fly the tea bag banner. Their libertarian posturing got them elected, but they are in the process of learning that while their ideology sounds good in speeches and looks good on paper, it only made sense 200 years ago, when our country was a fraction of its current size, and our interests did not span the globe. Today, libertarianism is an outdated and unrealistic stance.

Paul D. Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, said in a New York Times interview, “I’ve got 87 new people who are just getting to learn the process, who are just getting to learn the issues … Everybody who comes in learning the budget finds out that things are more difficult than they at first seemed.” The view is always different from inside the machine.

If Republicans are as concerned about the deficit as they claim to be, they should have let the Bush tax cuts expire, not jeopardize national security. Those cuts will end up costing us more than $2.3 trillion. It’s simple math. When Bill Clinton raised taxes in 1993, it gave us a huge surplus that George W. Bush inherited and squandered.

Maybe some day we can stop meddling so intensely in global affairs, but to start now, by cutting foreign aid, would be chaotic. One could argue that the $70 billion we have given to Egypt was wasted on upgrades to Hosni Mubarak’s vacation home. Now that Mubarak is out, crimping the flow of aid would only allow the American flags to burn with more fervor than before.



Our role of setting up puppet regimes that help us with one hand and throw tear gas canisters at their citizens with the other is over. We should let the protests play out on their own, but we need to be standing by with as much money and advice as possible, not posturing with empty hands and pockets. Then, we can finally have some legitimate allies in the Muslim world, and possibly resolve some of our budgetary problems by ending two wars that have currently cost us a combined $1.1 trillion and 5,912 lives.