Should America cut aid to Israel
Via Andrew Sullivan, Walter Pincus makes the case:
Nine days ago, the Israeli cabinet reacted to months of demonstrations against the high cost of living there and agreed to raise taxes on corporations and people with high incomes ($130,000 a year). It also approved cutting more than $850 million, or about 5 percent, from its roughly $16 billion defense budget in each of the next two years.If Israel can reduce its defense spending because of its domestic economic problems, shouldnâ??t the United States â?? which must cut military costs because of its major budget deficit â?? consider reducing its aid to Israel?...
I think this is the wrong way to look at this question. The overall costs of U.S. aid to Israel is, in dollar terms, tiny relative to the very large budget holes that eventually need to be filled if the U.S. is to balance its books. And some of that money circulates back into the U.S. economy (specifically to the most needy of recipients, U.S. arms manufacturers), so it's not really having a material impact on the American balance sheet in the same way that entitlements, tax policy or big-ticket nation building missions do.
You can make the case that Israel no longer deserves to be the largest recipient of U.S. aid due to strategic reasons - either Israel's declining strategic value to the U.S. or the elevation of another country's value relative to Israel - but that's not a case Pincus makes.
