[Drolefille]

Originally Posted by UGAalum94

It's not that I don't think people deserve food, but it's that I believe we presently have in place generally adequate levels of funding to provide food and private groups that actually hand out food. (although it would seem like a good idea to me to reevaluation how we pay farm subsidies to tip the scales toward food production if it we can see that the problem is in fact too little food available.) The breakdown, as I see it, occurs getting the food to the people, mainly because the people in need don't seek the aid, rather than because anyone is withholding it or because we just need more government employees out there ready to document the need.

Here you seem to be advocating more government support,

I think when you really look at who might be going hungry, they are going to be a hard group to serve better, largely because of their own behavior. Since I'm not someone who thinks it's the government's job to force itself on people who don't seek it's help, it's a problematic issue for me. If additional efforts need to me made, I'd rather handle them with tax incentives and private aid to groups who can document delivery of food to people in need.

Here you're saying it's not the government's job to go further than it has.

Paying almost a 1/4 of the UN's bills seems about right to you? Not even getting in to the costs of other support to UN programs? It doesn't to me. In additions to the 22% figure, where do you think most of the private support for UN programs is coming from? I think, even leaving out the military support Shinerbock mentioned, I think if you broke down UNICEF funding or other UN charities, you'd still be looking at way more US support than would seem proportional.

I didn't give a value judgement on the funding. 1/5 of the cost, based on an ability to pay, is not "basically funding the UN ourselves."

UNICEF and the like are not part of the UN and don't have an effect on the functioning of the UN.

I'm also not bothered by owning debt to other countries as long as we are meeting the terms of the debt repayment. Are we defaulting? If we need to assume government debt, I'd prefer to get the lowest terms or go with a lender who provides some other benefit. If it's international, I think it's okay, but I'll freely admit I haven't studied the issue.

Fair enough, as long as you're comfortable with other countries owning that debt. We do not "have" to assume government debt.

My point about why people hate us is that our perception about why they hate us is really too subjective to let it drive our domestic decision making. They hate us, and we should avoid it when we can, but deciding how we want to conduct our own government based on why we imagine they hate is isn't a particularly good plan.

And as I said, we shouldn't change our policies because Belgium is really pissed off, but we should give a damn that we are pissing off even those countries considered our allies. We should change our policies when they're bad ones.