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Notes -
Reuters:
Trump orders sweeping freeze for federal grants and loans
Trump order set to halt supply of HIV, malaria drugs to poor countries, sources say
Apparently based on this memo (pdf).
This seems very... crude. The question is if it's purposefully crude, if there's some structural reason it can't be better implemented, or if the person in charge is incompetent.
Also, impoundment? We'll see?
There is no reason why my tax dollars should be spent on anything in Africa. Not medicine, not food, not anything.
Cut them off. This is not crude, it's deliberate. Cut everything off, the useful stuff will bubble back up eventually.
Disease eradication is good for everyone. It is bad for global health to have a giant reservoir of AIDS, Malaria, Ebola, and god knows what else just waiting to make the jump to the developed world.
I don't care, and I don't believe you. I don't think disease eradication is good for me at all. I think it's good for poor starving Africans who I don't care about, and don't want to pay for. You have a large hurdle to convince me that tropical diseases a two continents and one ocean away have anything to do with me. You cannot simply assert it blithely.
If I believed that these programs were actually useful instead of leftist patronage networks, then I might be willing to entertain some sort of intervention. But all of this shit is just patronage networks. It's taking money from me to redistribute to loyalists and partisans.
Burn it all down. If ebola flares up again we can simply close the borders, which are far too porous anyway.
You can't close the borders without restructuring major parts of the economy. As currently constituted, large sectors of the US economy depend on the cheap labor of, effectively, indentured servants from the third world. American consumers are simply not going to want to pay US citizen level wages to fruit pickers and landscapers. Even the most nativist Trump supporters, by and large, buy cheap Chinese products when they go to the store instead of seeking out things made in America, and they hire third world immigrants to do manual labor instead of seeking out American citizens, and it is likely that even if a nativist government forced consumers to buy American, those consumers would become annoyed because their living situation would feel worse for them. It would take major technological progress to replace the role of the third world indentured servants in our economy.
Better get to work, then.
A moral problem as pernicious as slavery ever was, to be sure. A great evil, indeed.
I disagree. Plenty of people buy expensive fruits now, and having a landscaper is a privilege unbecoming the American yeoman.
I think war with China is what it will take, because then we don't have a choice. If we don't go to war with China, it will be because they strangled all resistance and took over the USA without needing to fire a shot.
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