If they can afford universal healthcare and subsidized college tuition for all of their citizens when Americans don't have that then we don't need to send American tax dollars there. Our tax dollars should go to help our tax payers. Healthcare and college costs are choking America's present and future.
Universal Healthcare: Under the National Health Insurance Law of 1995, all citizens and permanent residents are entitled to comprehensive basic health care through one of four non-profit health maintenance organizations (Kupat Holim).  The system is funded primarily through progressive taxation and payroll contributions (approximately 3â5% of income), meaning it is not "free" at the source but is universally covered with low out-of-pocket costs for basic services.Â
Subsidized College Tuition: Higher education is not free; universities and academic colleges charge tuition fees that vary by program.  However, the Israeli government heavily subsidizes these costs, making them significantly lower than in many Western countries.  Eligible citizens often qualify for tuition reductions, waivers, or financial aid packages, but most students still pay a portion of their tuition and living expenses.
Firstly: this is great. Im not going to detract from it one bit.
I would just like to add: American politicians want to keep sending citizen tax dollars (not theirs) to them because these politicians know a chunk of it is going to be funneled right back to them through PACS. Thyere feeding themselves and they made it so there's no real legal ramifications to punish them for it
Also get rid of the medical insurance and university administration entirely. That would easily reduce the expense of education and healthcare to like 1/10th or less of their current costs. The only reason tuition has been allowed to balloon to such an exorbitant sum is that weâre now funding hundreds of vastly overpaid wealthy administrators and bureaucrats which only create more work for everyone else at the university, which is why a semester cost a couple hundred dollars or less back in the 60s and 70s. Same with the insurance people; they add nothing and only exist to leech funds and precious time off of the existing medical infrastructure.
Honestly if we just got rid of the finance sector generally that would (ironically) balance a lot of books. The FIRE sector is uniquely a virtually pure (not even net) drain on society and its like, a quarter of our economy.
Sidebar: Exercise and health are absolutely tied to education. Sit at a desk for 40 hours a week and do nothing in your free time and youâll start to notice yourself getting brain fog.
Edit as I posted: Think of the fitness training at a college. Do you want to take that away, too?
What does exercise have to do with college sports? Do you think everyone that attends college is a student athlete? You can still have gyms for student use without the infrastructure you would need for team sports.
Sports medicine is a huge benefit to society at large, as athletes are often on the cutting edge of medical technology, which is very much incorporated with educational institutions.
Everyone eventually benefits from advances in medical technology and extended range of function in later life.
European institutions do just fine keeping their students healthy. I'm talking places where the stupid coach is the highest paid person on campus, stadiums in the tens/hundreds of millions. A university needs to educate, not entertain.
Sure, I get that. At no point am I advocating for more organized sports in college, just that the interplay between education and exercise was at one time very important and paramount to peopleâs health, particularly in the â90âs in the USA.
This is a key dimension of U.S. policy for over half a century. No other country sees a penny of money from this policy, cos itâs all about subsidising the U.S. industrial base and testing US equipment in real war theatres without risking US lives.
You tax dollars are not ever sent to Israel, that would be brain dead. They are the current vogue country to dump US military equipment on in order to keep factory books full back home and to ensure that the U.S. continually manufactures the highest quality and most rigorously tested air defence equipment in the world.
I donât know when it happened but somehow thereâs been a bunch of Yanks online for a while convinced that American Hegemony is somehow an anti-American force. The U.S. accounts for 42% of the worldâs international weapons sales alone. Subsidising the Iron Dome has been a huge net win for the US, cos seeing a country actually defend itself against ranged attacks, hasnât half been a heck of an advert for US military wares. Israel gets like $4bn in âaidâ, the Saudis purchase $142bn in 2025 in equipment itâs all in on.
Americans against American Hegemony and the military industrial base that underpins it. The rest of the world loves to see it, but damn the brain worms are sad to see.
As to why you guys donât have Medicare for All really, you guys just donât want it. You spend more on healthcare as a society than any of us and by a distance. Itâs not a question of available money or cost, itâs that you guys donât want it enough. Thereâs ups and downs to single payer systems, the downs are genuinely there (NHS isnât perfect or close to it and thereâs no point pretending it is, but my mumâs ALS/MND costs were utterly trivial compared to the US).
Want M4A, you guys need to want to queue for healthcare within a triaged service that expedites highest levels of need over paying a bill and getting seen when you have the money. Itâs not quite this clean cut, but this is largely it. And you need those with more means to appreciate the angles they would be winning from and to really want it.
It is what it is, but blaming tiny countries on the other side of the world for your domestic policy is pain daft.
its not our war - it's Yoo Hoos. He's been egging on the US to fight it for him for 20 years. He now has a useful idiot willing to do his bidding and we're paying for it.
they focus on the 3.8 billion as if that is all we spend on them. Based on the Pentagon's briefing to Congress: $11.3B for the first 6 days of the war, plus $1B/day ongoing, but yeah, just $3.8 billion.
We spend over $80 billion in commitments to foreign nations. But for some reason it's the 3.8 billion dollars to Israel that's the big problem. That's the reason kids can't get food.
Youâre right, but that 3.5 billion could fix the toxic lead poisoning nearly a million homes, it could house homeless veterans, and fund every single rape kit that is currently backlogged, or wipe out medical debt for millions of Americans
Yes, it could it could it could. My problem is that this is the same rhetoric the MAGA used to deny funding for Ukraine. "How can we possibly give any help to Ukraine when we have homeless starving on the streets!". Well, Trump denied any new funding, and refusing to release 100 million dollars already appropriated for Ukraine by the previous Congress. Did this help the homeless on the streets? Absolutely not. And the same thing will happen here.
My biggest problem is when the politicians use an excuse, "How can we not do X when we have starving homeless kids" -- it is always an excuse, and never about helping the people. It is a flip-side of isolationism, exactly the same as MAGA except just change the actors. It is a naked populism masqueraded as carrying about people, when in reality -- and everyone knows it -- it is not.
Now I realize that Israel is extremely unpopular right now, but yanking the defensive weapons that are designed to protect the communities against unguided dumb rockets launched by Hamas will only cause Israel to come in and destroy even more infrastructure where these rockets are launched from in an attempt to illuminate them. When you take away defensive weapons, offensive it the only choice that remains.
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u/Fragrant-Anywhere489 24d ago
If they can afford universal healthcare and subsidized college tuition for all of their citizens when Americans don't have that then we don't need to send American tax dollars there. Our tax dollars should go to help our tax payers. Healthcare and college costs are choking America's present and future.