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Good. Tying aid to cuts in IRS funding was absolutely asinine. Failing to fund Ukraine, which is actually fighting for it’s continued existence as a political entity is also asinine.
Yes, Hamas is a horrible organization; but, the Israeli Government isn’t facing an existential threat and has not been an innocent actor in the situation in Gaza. Aid and support should come with strings attached to ensure the protection of civilians and property rights of the people being displaced.
Fully agree, but have to add:
Most of the aid to Ukraine is actually just money for the US defense industry and military. They get to donate old stuff without paying for disposal and get money to build new staff.
The ROI on supporting Ukraine is huge. The US is eliminating their second biggest threat without sacrificing a single soldier and only at the cost of donating old equipment.
Israel, on the other hand, is more of a leech on the USA. They don’t provide much benefit and they cost a lot of money and soft power. Unlike Ukraine, they have a powerful lobbying group to get out much more from the USA than would ever be warranted if they didn’t hijack US domestic politics.
I think you misunderstand Isreals role in the region, as far as US politics is concerned. As long as Isreal is a viable force in the region, They are seen as a knife at the collective Arab/Iranian/Egyptian throat. They act as a US proxy providing a counter weight to other regional powers. I’m no defender of Isreal, there actions, or Netanyahu, just providing another point of view.
I know that argument, but then you must also accept that acts like 9/11 are blowback and forever wars like Iraq, Afghanistan and ISIS are inevitable.
The American people do not profit of off this modern colonialism.
Just trading peacefully with the Muslim world would be cheaper and cost less blood.
“Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security.”
— Alexander Haig
Like it or not, it’s as true then as it is now.
Israel has a VERY strong military industrial complex and the US is a long time collaborator and customer. It is far from a “leech” scenario.
Also, don’t forget that we are getting immense amounts of research and testing in Ukraine. A LOT of our gear has never been (meaningfully) used in anger. That, combined with the reality of a modern war against near-ish peers makes those “aid packages” worth their weight in gold. The paper and the envelopes, not the crates full of javelins.
Israel keeps the whole region unstable. That’s an immeasurable benefit to US oil interests.
Saudi Arabia and Yemen, the Syrian war, Islamic state.
Israel certainly is adding to the instability, but the region is pretty unstable without considering them.
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Or human rights.
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Tying aid to cuts in IRS funding was absolutely asinine.
Republicans will run ads saying that Democrats refused to support Israel and Democrats will mumble about the violation of parliamentary principles. Then voters will ignore the whole thing and vote exclusively on how they feel about abortion.
The average voter doesn’t pay attention so you’re right.
They fixate on what’s presented the loudest, because that’s the news most readily available to them.
Also, I won’t lie, I’ve had a lot of personal drama around women’s health in my own life. I’m a Texas resident who knows quite a few women who have miscarried or needed to terminate their pregnancy in the last ten years. I don’t know what any of them are expected to do over the next ten years. But I do know that my sister has told me straight up “I can’t move back to Texas to be with the family, because I want to have more kids”.
Why would wanting to have more kids discourage you from moving back to Texas? Because she’s at a high risk of miscarriage. And if she miscarries, there’s a real possibility that the local hospital will let her bleed out in the ER before they risk the liability of performing a life-saving operation.
I can’t ignore that impact on my immediate family, even as I recognize the shitty attempts by politicians to make Israel/Ukraine into a cash grab for their donor bases. All that becomes - for better or worse - a secondary concern beside the fact that my sister doesn’t feel safe living in Texas while pregnant.
I’m sure I’m not alone in this regard.
Tying aid to cuts in IRS funding was absolutely asinine.
Not really, at least in their minds.
It jives with party dogma, depresses audits and therefore, donors win big (which fills campaign war chests).
Perfectly sensible by those metrics. /s
The irs cuts were to curtail the new staff which was tasked with auditing the middle class.
agreed.
In fairness, yes. If we consider the perspective of the GOP as a legitimate attempt to balance budgets, tying foreign aid to cuts elsewhere in spending makes sense. Then reality shows up, taps us on the shoulder and we quickly discover that the GOP’s views on “balanced budgets” is actually just a smoke screen for “cut stuff we don’t like” and the whole argument falls apart.
So ya, sticking with the “asinine” descriptor.well you can also balance budgets by raising taxes or even just collecting income, investment, and corporate taxes equally and having tiers that don’t cap at six figures.
BUT THAT’S SOCIALISM!!!11!1one!1!
/s in case it wasn’t blindingly obvious.
In seriousness, just rolling back the Bush era tax cuts would provide a huge boost to Federal Government revenue. There are a lot of other possible options, as well, which could raise revenue. But, the GOP never met a tax cut they didn’t like and a tax increase they didn’t hate.
Balancing the budget implies funding the IRS. Very few government investments have a higher return than tax audits.
The headline makes it sound as if Democrats are widely opposing Israeli funding and supporting Ukrainian funding and blocking it on those grounds. It seems as if it’s really the IRS defunding that they are blocking it on, and the war funding is largely incidental. I had a brief moment of hope that morals prevailed over the American war machine.
I hate those omnibus bills, we have them too in Canada, it’s completely ridiculous and undemocratic.
The bill also contained provisions to cut funding for the IRS so rich tax cheats could get away with it. Everyone knew the bill would fail. It was theater on the part of the House Republicans, who passed the bill to the Dem controlled Senate.
In surprise to no one, the DOA bill is DOA.
The current GOP plan (which looks a lot like historical GOP plans) is to put up bills full of poisoned pills and then blame Democrats for refusing to pass them. Their donors get to spend a billion dollars on ads saying how Democrats are hypocrits. Cable news / national papers will do a bunch of “Both sides!” view-from-nowhere stories that wax nostalgic about bipartisanship. Mike Johnson will premier a NYT Bestselling book “Jesus Save America”, in which he advocates all liberals be subject to a state-financed exorcism. Fetterman will personally grab up and break a Palestinian migrant over his knee to prove how much the Senate supports Israel. The Government will shut down.
And, after six months of people screaming about how Social Security checks are not going out any minute now, you’ll be surprised to find out how much of this DOA bill gets included in the compromise they eventually settle on.
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Can we please investigate these fucking Republicans for corrupt ties to Russia??
👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
This is the best summary I could come up with:
WASHINGTON, Nov 7 (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Democrats on Tuesday blocked a Republican effort to win quick approval for a bill providing emergency aid to Israel that passed the House of Representatives last week, but that provides no assistance for Ukraine’s war against Russia.
Democrats objected, stressing the importance of providing aid to Ukraine as well as Israel, in addition to humanitarian aid, border security funding and money to push back against China in the Indo-Pacific that was in a $106 billion funding request President Joe Biden sent to Congress last month.
They also accused House Republicans of playing politics with the crisis in Israel, delaying aid for the Jewish State by tying support to cutting funding for the Internal Revenue Service, a favorite target for Republicans, rather than writing a bipartisan bill.
The House bill would provide $14.3 billion for Israel as it responds to a deadly Oct. 7 attack by Islamist Hamas militants, but also cut the same amount of money from the IRS.
The funds would include $4 billion for procurement of Israel’s Iron Dome and David’s Sling defense systems to counter short-range rocket threats as well as some transfers of equipment from U.S. stocks.
Senate leaders are writing their own supplemental funding bill and hope to introduce it as soon as this week.
The original article contains 348 words, the summary contains 217 words. Saved 38%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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Anti-Semites the lot of them. /s
Supporting Ukraine is a good thing because Russia is the aggressor and invaded their country.
Supporting Palestine is bad because Israel is the real aggressor and has invaded their country since 1960s, illegally occupied land, built settlements on their land and is now looking civilians in the name of defence.
I thought the /s denotes sarcasm.
There are two wars that America is having internal debates on whether or not to aid them. One side wants to aid one war, and the other side wants to aid another war. Neither seems to be interested in the war the other is interested in.
I mean I’m not the only one saying it, but it smells like WWIII.
WW3 is more likely if Russia succeeds in Ukraine.
What does succeeding mean here? Because I’ve heard different people have different takes on that. Do you mean gaining any land compared to a year ago?
Edit: is there some baggage I don’t know about tied to this question? It was a genuine question. I don’t why it’s downvoted without any responses.
They need to absorb Ukraine. They need it to reach Moldova, Romania and Poland. They are hoping that west will give up (perhaps US get trump again who will gift the Ukraine to putin).
The thing is that while in Ukraine there’s actual hot war. Russia is fighting hybrid warfare with the West, and it is way better at it than us. All the disinformation, qanon etc might seem like not a big deal to some, but those people also have views changed and are willing to fight with its own government. The BLM protests in 2020, and current attempts to make people fight over Israel VS Palestine is current attempt.
So succeeding for Russia means taking all of Ukraine? I just don’t see that happening with the latest reports talking about how firmly digged in both sides are right now. I honestly think Russia lost their chance at taking all of Ukraine when their initial invasion “failed”. Maybe I’m missing something though.
Russia knows Ukraine can’t keep it up if they don’t get external support. They are heavily invested in disinformation in the West to promote anti Ukraine sentiment. If Ukraine stops getting supplies they will have no chance.
That’s a neat story but doesn’t bear much relation to reality. The Democrats want to fulfill the US’s obligations to both Israel and Ukraine, whereas many Republicans want to see Russian flags flying in Kyiv. The Senate Democrats blocked the Israel-only package because the Republican Congress may then not send a Ukraine package, hence the Democrats wanting the two together.
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Everyone I know is saying it too.
What really stuck out was Putin withdrawing / moving equipment and people, at the same time he’s withdrawing from the nuclear test treaty, all while theyre in a “stalemate” with the Ukraine. I know it’s a testing treaty that even America was never in, but something seems fishy, and no one seems to really be talking about it.
Isreals war is pretty obvious on its face, (You see who’s throwing punches at whom, in the news) but if Russia nukes Ukraine, it’s going to be a whole other animal.
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We can do both easily if the rich and corporations start paying what they should.
They got you bamboozled into thinking we cant.
I’ve said this for a long time, but we don’t even need to make radical changes to the tax code. I bet if we fix the loopholes so that companies can’t avoid paying the (21%) tax they are SUPPOSED TO BE paying with clever accounting, the extra $8+ billion annually would move mountains.
https://itep.org/55-profitable-corporations-zero-corporate-tax/
Not that radical changes to the tax code aren’t also a good idea.
edit: grammarThere should be a tax on stock. Not when sold, not on dividends. On stock that’s stockpiled. 1% of the current price per share per quarter. All of these billionares live off of loans against their stock as collateral. And most of them have millions of shares in their corporations. Musk owns around 199 million shares of Tesla, for example. Want to be obsecenly rich? Pay the fuckin’ piper.
Just as long as we exclude retirement accounts. There’s already punishments if you try to use it for other purposes.
Fair enough. As I said, this is about billionaires gaming the system, not the average blue collar citizens.
Yeah exactly. Stocks are tricky since a lot of retirement investment makes use of them. It’s also smarter to put some of your money in an investment account to grow it, vs in a savings account.
It’s easy to exclude retirement, just make 401k and IRA exempt if you’re actually using it properly. Individual investment accounts are trickier, especially since they’re useful to keep your savings ahead of inflation. Maybe here, you apply an either/or tax. If your income from typical sources is higher than your gain in investment value, then it’s fine. But if your personal investment account value increases more than your income, you get slapped with taxes.
And for the love of God, make it illegal to use property like stocks so we can actually afford homes.
Well said. 👍
Also remove the restrictions on multi use zoning. Housing scarcity is entirely artificial in most locations. If the pressure valve was released prices would stabilize.
There should be a tax on stock. Not when sokd, not on dividends. On stock that’s stockpiled. 1% of the current rate per share per quarter.
By the time you are 65, it is suggested to have built up enough investments that you can withdraw 5% annually and cover all your expenses. If you need to cover $40k in annual living expenses, that is $800k in built-up investments for retirement. A 1% tax on that per quarter is an annual $32k tax on this middle class individual. That’s a devastating level of taxation that completely kills any possibility for middle class people to invest for retirement.
Wanna gamble? Pay the fucking price. I don’t give two shits about anyone’s dividends. I literally couldn’t care less.
You’re deliberately ignoring what I said, and basing these percentages on some average that means nothing. And you know I’m not talking about Average Blue Collar Joe’s “investments.” I’m talking about multi-multi millionaires and billionaires. They want to be obscenely, disgustingly, filthy rich and bribe politicians in our society? Fucking pay.
#fuckyourdividends
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Isolationism doesn’t work. It just means Ukraine gets overrun in Russia’s war of conquest.
It isn’t truly just about Ukraine. Ukraine is a stepping stone for Moldova and Poland. The goal is to get control of Moldova, Romania, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia militarily or other means (Remember when US tried to stop invasion of Ukraine putin gave considering to expel those countries from NATO? This is why)
If Ukraine fails the war will still happen, it will be just on NATO territory.
