Battling “Business As Usual”
When newly elected Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) proposed cutting aid to Israel, the howls of protest from all across the bipartisan political spectrum were painfully revealing. Matthew Brooks, executive director for the Republican Jewish Coalition — an organization with several former Bush administration officials on its board of directors — considers cutting the $3 billion a year that the United States gives to Israel to be off limits. “We share Senator Paul’s commitment to restraining the growth of federal spending, but we reject his misguided proposal to end U.S. assistance to our ally Israel,” he said. New York Representative Nita Lowey, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations subcommittee that deals with foreign aid, put it more bluntly: “Using our budget deficit as a reason to abandon Israel is inexcusable.... I call on all those who value the U.S.-Israel relationship to make it clear that our nation will not abandon our ally Israel.”
Cutting off the enormous sum of taxpayer dollars that the United States sends annually to Tel Aviv is simply not an option for Washington insiders. For that matter, the rest of the $20 billion in overseas aid that Senator Paul wants to cut in his brash new $500 billion budget reduction proposal is probably just as sacred. As is the roughly $16 billion that Senator Paul wants to trim from funding for the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Foreign aid, including support for overseas military occupations, is sacrosanct in official Washington and among the numerous public, private, and non-profit organizations whose continuance depends upon maintaining the foreign aid status quo.
And foreign aid is far from the only sacred cow. Reducing, let alone eliminating, the vast array of federal government subsidies — for agriculture, education, housing, and just about every other corner of the misnamed “private sector” — is something Capitol Hill mandarins refuse to contemplate. So is winding down the most wasteful and destructive programs of all — the gargantuan trans-generational wealth redistribution shell games (Social Security and Medicare). And every subsidy and spending program, no matter how inane or unconstitutional, is sure to have defenders in both parties wherever pork is diverted to constituents. In a city where every budgetary cow is sacred, no one wants his own ox gored.
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