Stop Foreign Aid ~ Focus on Home Aid!

I'm tired of it! Look at any news reported story on the internet relating to food stamps, WIC, Family Independence (also known as welfare), Housing Assistance, illegal immigrants, or just about anything with the word "free" in it. Then look at the comments.

People are ugly and hateful. Here are a few quotes directly from my facebook feed this morning.

"Food stamps/welfare was designed to "help" Americans who fell upon hard times, NOT for millions of illegal invaders or lazy - able bodied folks with their hands out"

"Want food? Work for it, i don't care if it takes 8 hours WORK! That's how people ate back then, its how you will eat now."

These are the comments directed at Americans from Americans. We have so many people who are against helping people here. These same people often post Facebook memes implying those who get welfare are lazy worthless people, yet I never see these people posting about all the money that goes on foreign aid.

Amount budgeted for foreign aid by our USA government, 50 BILLION a year! All while we struggle with these statistics with our own people.

• An estimated 565,000 homeless people in the USA
• 50,000 of the homeless are Veterans
• 200,000 are estimated to be families with children
• 1 in 7 Americans struggle to have enough food each day
• 200,000 foster children age out of foster care each decade with no support
• 40% of those aged out foster children will become homeless
• The number of people not getting proper medical care can't even be tracked
• 46,000,000 people get Food Stamps/SNAP/EBT

The United States of America sends out 50 BILLION a year in different types of foreign aid each year. So lets look at the statistics above and see what could be done to help those here. Lets say we chose to help each one of those statistics each year until they have all been helped.

• Take the 565,000 homeless people. The first year each of those people could be offered $88,000 in resources. In my part of the country $88,000 could buy a small decent house and a car. This way they would have a roof that is paid for and a car to look for work so that they can maintain that house and its utilities.
• Now for all those getting Food Stamps, we could spend almost $1100 on each of them. That would be multiple thousands in most homes since the number of people getting assistance includes the children of the parents getting it. With that money the government could help these families with whatever struggle is keeping them from being able to afford their own food. It could be money to get a vehicle so they don't have to work in fast food. It could be money to help them get a month ahead on their house payment so they can go back to college part time. It could be a retainer fee to help them with a lawyer to speed up the disability process. So say my family of 5 got EBT. Our family would get $5500 that year. That would be enough to pay the average rent in my area for 10 months.
• Next we could help the 200,000 aged out foster children each decade. That would be $250,000 per foster child that the government FAILED TO FIND A PERMANENT HOME FOR! $250,000 is enough in my area to pay for a local college for 4 years, buy a small home, and pay for a vehicle so they could work and not become the majority statistic for foster children.

See how this could work? Instead of complaining about helping our own, we could instead complain about helping other countries and help our own people get ahead.

Some will say that people will abuse the system. To those people I implore you to think about how much abuse there is in helping other countries. Do they really do what they are suppose to with the money? Does it really help if we have been handing that money to them and nothing has changed so we have to give the same countries more the following years?

Will Americans still cheat the system? Of course!! There are bad people everywhere! So to think you'd rather help other countries than help the people here is bizarre!

This is not a debate on immigration. This is a debate on helping those close to home before shipping money all over the world.

Think about what 50 BILLION dollars could do for our children, our veterans, our homeless, OUR PEOPLE!!!

Yes, we are one world and should help everyone if we can. However we can't help the world if we cant even help ourselves! One step at a time we could become better. Instead we choose to continue supporting the world while we let our own people starve while screaming "they're lazy". Seems a bit backwards if you ask me! Let's fix us so that we can all help fix the rest of the world that needs help!