BF2S Forums DAST Chat

Kmar wrote:

If foreign aid to all countries were stopped immediately, Israel would be the biggest net beneficiary. This is because the U.S. pays much more foreign aid to Israel’s enemies combined than to Israel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_aid

13urnzz wrote:

FEOS wrote:

13urnzz wrote:

might do something for the economy back home, too.

Nah. Just noise compared to entitlement spending.

but - that's exactly the attitude that's lead to runaway deficit spending.

put everything on the table. just because foreign aid is background noise compared to defense, entitlements, etc. doesn't mean it should be immune from being looked at.

everything needs to be on the table.

Kmar wrote:

Kmar wrote:

.. and allowing bases, sharing military intel, secrets, and tactics might qualify as being an ally.

try to keep up please.
We give more aid to arab nation states and get very little in return also.

rdx-fx wrote:

What are we up to?

Something like $500 Billion pissed away on Afghanistan?

Thinking we could've put that money to much better use in the US.
Perhaps on infrastructure maintenance (interstate highways, local roads, railways)

Hell, forget the intent of Posse Comitatus (DHS has), and send the Marines & Air Force into Detroit to secure, rebuild, and do all that fun COINy stuff.
Bet we'd have better luck in Detroit than in Kabul.

Beduin wrote:

FEOS wrote:

$1.65T in direct war costs for both Iraq and Afghanistan.

including disability pensions for wounded soldiers?

13urnzz wrote:

FEOS wrote:

Beduin wrote:

including disability pensions for wounded soldiers?

Notice use of the word "direct."

VA benefits are paid and accounted separately.

Even if you include those, they are still overshadowed by SS and Medicare.

overshadowed, but a chunk of our treasure is no longer in our treasury. we have contractors outnumbering our troops, and a situation where a war we have been winning is continuously weakening our fiscal strength.

The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund was created by an Act of Congress, the Air Transportation

Safety and System Stabilization Act (49 USC 40101), [1]

shortly after 9/11 to compensate the victims of the attack (or their families) in exchange for their agreement not to sue the airline corporations involved. Kenneth Feinberg was appointed by Attorney General John Ashcroft to be Special Master of the fund. He worked for 33 months pro bono. He developed the regulations governing the administration of the fund and administered all aspects of the program.

Feinberg was responsible for making the decisions on how much each family of a 9/11 victim would receive. Feinberg had to estimate how much each victim would have earned in a full lifetime. If a family accepted the offer, it was not possible to appeal. Families unhappy with the offer were able to appeal in a nonadversarial, informal hearing to present their case however they wanted. Feinberg personally presided over more than 900 of the 1,600 hearings. At the end of the process $7 billion was awarded to 97% of the families; the average payout was $1.8 million. A non-negotiable clause in the acceptance papers for the settlements was that the families were to never file suit against the airlines for any lack of security orotherwise unsafe procedures.

13urnzz wrote:

FEOS wrote:

Contractors do not outnumber our troops.

In Iraq, they do.

FEOS wrote:

And Obama spent roughly 4x that much in his first 2.5 years in office.

Obama started accounting for the war effort, which previous administrations didn't do, in the general outlay.

FEOS wrote:

Compared to ten years to do the same in war spending. And you still think the problem is war spending?

No, i think the problem is spending.

i don't give a flying fuck at a rolling donut if it's war spending, massive non-defense discretionary spending, a so-called drop in the bucket foreign aid spending, or even Bush authorized TARP spending - this is not a Democrat v. Republican, con v. lib, my sides-better-than-your-sides issue.

the so called "Republicans" have done no better than the so called "Democrats" when it's come to pissing this countrys' assets away.

don't give me no partisan bullshit when addressing the flight of wealth, I DON"T FUCKING CARE IF YOU*RE REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT - if you defend the spending of anything in Washington DC you are just defending your flavor of stupidity.

BOTH PARTIES ARE PARTY TO THE RAPE OF AMERICA, REPUBLICANS AS WELL AS DEMOCRATS.

Kmar wrote:

I live in a state that has a closed primary. So it is necessary for me to put a party on my voter card. This is one of the reasons why the party opposing the incumbent almost always jumps up during election season.

Some of it is probably sabotage.

AussieReaper wrote:

An airline should be prepared to have a terrorist attempt to take control of the cockpit and have safety standards in place to prevent that from happening. It's as simple as that.

Macbeth wrote:

AussieReaper wrote:

An airline should be prepared to have a terrorist attempt to take control of the cockpit and have safety standards in place to prevent that from happening. It's as simple as that.

Okay, Mr. expert. Got some safety preacuations the airlines could have taken that would have prevented the 9/11 attacks?

Locks on doors? Really? What would have prevented the hijackers from waiting for there to be some reason for a stewardess to go into the cockpit before making their move?

Or what if the doors remained locked the whole flight and the hijackers decided to execute passengers or stewardesses until the pilots opened the door? There wasn't an precedent at that time for people to be using planes as missiles. The airline pilots wouldn't have had thought the hijackers were going to crash the planes but instead just force them to land somewhere like every other hijacking in history before 9/11.




So yeah, the 9/11 families needed some money and found the only target to be found were the airliners.