> I generally agree with Musk's politics
Children are dying in Africa as a direct result of his actions right now.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/04/14/g-s1-...
Children are dying in Africa as a direct result of his actions right now.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/04/14/g-s1-...
International trade agreements and political over-engineering of the global order are to blame.
US is clearly not the only country.
I guess other aid agencies are already busy with their existing programs and can't easily step in when the country with the biggest GDP stop suddenly.
Edit: See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_sovere...
Americans consistently overestimate how much is USA helping others.
From my prospective everyone hates America, but weirdly wants to migrate here at he same time. (Except for the online minority who threaten to leave but never do)
But they just cut it off from one day to the next in a place with challenging logistics, ensuring that some of the world's poorest people are likely to die so the world's wealthiest man can muck around in politics as a hobby.
The United States is approaching 37 trillion dollars of debt. There will be no aid to Zambia or any other country if we default on that debt.
If you see someone drowning in the river, and you stand by and are a good swimmer, is it not your responsibility to help?
> There will be no aid to Zambia or any other country if we default on that debt.
US Foreign Aid was a trivial amount of money buying much soft power around the globe. China for comparison has almost double the foreign aid amount the US had, relative to GNI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_sovere...
It seems like they actually plan on cutting it, so I don't think your argument has any weight.
We will probably never be in agreement with government having more money to inefficiently distribute vs keeping it in the pockets of the earners. Sorry.
Politicians which are drastically cutting foreign aid usually doesn't increase it locally because they do not agree with the whole concept.
We will probably never be in agreement with government having more money to inefficiently distribute vs keeping it in the pockets of the earners. Sorry.
And if $240 million is trivial, they can just send it to me instead.
But this is part of the reason I am quite happy with USAID being ended. The goal of effective charity should be to make itself obsolete. We can see both that that was entirely possible here, but also in no meaningful way pursued at all. They could have spent those years and millions of dollars funding the infrastructure and other pipelines necessary make sure people were aware of and could easily access these state (or other private charity) clinics. Instead they just acted as a dependency creating drug distributor. In one case having a guy literally just handing out drugs, at his discretion, at a truck stop.