Over the last 20 years, the U

A Guy Called LULU — Mon, 02 May 2016 14:28:29 +0000

In reply to The False Impasse Over Aid to Israel

Over the last 20 years, the U.S. has been slowly phasing out economic aid to Israel and gradually replacing it with increased military aid. In 2007, the Bush Administration and the Israeli government agreed to a 10-year, $30 billion military aid package FY 2009 to FY 2018. In 2012, the U.S. began giving Israel $3.1 billion a year (or an average of $8.5 million a day) and promised to provide that amount every year through FY 2018. During a March 2013 visit to Israel, President Obama promised to continue to provide multi-year commitments of military aid to the Israeli government (subject to the approval of Congress).

Figures like a “billion” become common and lose much of their value or shock effect when thrown around so casually and heard so often. A million is still a big number. Put a different way, three-point-one billion is thirty-one thousand million.

The NYT’s says Obama wants to “burnish his legacy by an agreement which would significantly raise this number. That suggests, without overtly saying so, that giving Israel millions more a day, money that our country has to borrow, is unquestionably a good thing and would be recognized as such. I personally believe that his legacy would be much better enhanced if he would establish the U.S. as the leader in the relationship between the two countries and tell Netanyahu to ‘burnish this you belligerent prick’, although I would expect him to put it in a slightly more diplomatic way. Netanyahu suggests, or threatens, that if Obama doesn’t raise the dollar support enough that he just might wait and “negotiate” with the next President, apparently thinking, and apparently correctly so, that it is important to Obama to be the one whose name is attached to the big buck giveaway. Hillary Clinton might miss that opportunity if Obama meets Netanyahu’s demands but there will always be more that can be given and Clinton has promised to take the relationship to the “next level”. Eight-point-five million dollars a day already of borrowed money given to a well off country could be better spent in the United States in about a billion different ways, IMO.

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Over the last 20 years, the U