{"id":34248,"date":"2013-02-21T08:39:25","date_gmt":"2013-02-21T12:39:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=34248"},"modified":"2013-02-21T08:39:25","modified_gmt":"2013-02-21T12:39:25","slug":"kerry-defends-foreign-aid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=34248","title":{"rendered":"Kerry defends foreign aid"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yeah, wipe that shocked look off your face. John Kerry, an especially bad Senator and presidential candidate demonstrates that particular trait will carry over to the State Department. Yesterday he defended the amount that the government spends on foreign aid. From the Washington Post<\/a>;<\/p>\n

Politicians too easily make a bogeyman of American foreign aid, said Kerry, who was a politician for more than three decades, while the payoffs of engagement abroad are badly misjudged by many ordinary Americans, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can tell you that nothing gets a crowd clapping faster than to say, \u2018I\u2019m going to Washington to get them to stop spending all that money over there,\u2019?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

In truth, the foreign aid budget, as well as the entire State Department budget, is a pittance, Kerry said, just about a penny on the total U.S. federal budget dollar.<\/p>\n

The State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development budget request for 2012 was $51.6 billion. Although Kerry did not make the direct comparison, the Pentagon spent an estimated $115 billion on the Afghanistan war in the same year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, I wouldn’t make the comparison either, if the facts directly contradict my point as they do in this case. Us “ordinary Americans” don’t see the point of propping up failed states and folks who will someday kill Americans, or at least celebrate the deaths of Americans as we’ve seen in recent years. They’re going to hate us anyway, so why pay them to hate us, while we could probably get the same result for free? At least then they’d have a reason to hate us.<\/p>\n

\u201cDeploying diplomats today is much cheaper than deploying troops tomorrow,\u201d Kerry said to applause.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, well, as we saw in Benghazi, we have to deploy troops along with the diplomats, so what’s your point?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yeah, wipe that shocked look off your face. John Kerry, an especially bad Senator and presidential … Kerry defends foreign aid<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-john-kerry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34248\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}