The US is the largest funder of refugees worldwide by like an order of magnitude. I don't think I knew that before. Both I don't think that I really credit or understand properly how much money the US has vs other countries, in much the same way as we can't really understand how much money the 1% has or whatever. Your instinct is to be like yes there's rich people and they're richer than us but you don't really get how there's like 50 people who control the GDP of the world and then the rest of us kind of live off the rounding error like it's that different and as a part of that you also can't really understand how much the world could be different if we could use that 90% of the world's wealth by the principles at which we currently use 10% of the world's wealth like what are we paying for the luxury of having a super rich elite exist. For deciding inequality is like kind of ok if we're not desperate. Which we aren't largely that's the devil's bargain of the post WWII first world right we get to eat and have shelter and not have kids chewed up in mines and even get our cancer cured and stuff it's a lot better than the last peasant serf deal. Still. That's a tangent.
The US is like the whole pie of refugee funding worldwide. That's something I kind of didn't notice and part of the reason is because of the above and the other part is because on the left you're more focused on the deficit rhetoric of how small a piece of the US discretionary spending/national budget/ GDP pie that is ( BTW did you know Britain just committed to .7 % of their one of those it's a big deal imagine if that were the world standard what we could do?) But that can blind you to how much it means that we do what we do.
This is less out of texts than my own head but I find it interesting that both my birth country and even more so my adoptive countries are all immigrant nations. I mean we killed off the overwhelming majority of our native born populations (Aboriginal Australians and native Americans both represent like a percent of the country's population today). And something like two thirds of Australia has a parent born overseas. Like it's extreme. So what's interesting is the total lack of self reflection in the national debate of both places when talking about"immigrants." I mean racism is strong I guess but the ability of a country where literally every person has immigrants in their family tree to have a problem with immigrants as a monolithic other is confusing to me. Like I really don't understand how it's possible.
It seems the US provides a lot of the funding for refugees but not "the whole pie" https://www.unhcr.org/5baa00b24
ReplyDelete(Note there are only 10 million people in Sweden. Also note private donors in Spain give way more than the Spanish government?)
The US is giving a lot, perhaps more than Europe collectively though I haven't added that up. Of course the US is also doing far more than its fair share in creating refugees in the first place. The debate in the US that makes media seems to be about foreign aid more generally rather than refugees specifically.
The distribution of wealth does seem to have reached pre-French Revolution standards, and with similar levels of taxation and accountability for the de facto aristocracy. It is difficult to find out the details though. Try and figure out who owns Australia's banks for instance (https://thenewdaily.com.au/money/finance-news/2017/11/13/big-bank-ad-campaign/).