America's Decline: Not a Mystery When You Fund It
The Hill published an opinion piece lamenting America's seemingly 'irreversible' decline, citing economic inequality and domestic woes. While they touch on symptoms, they carefully avoid the elephant in the room: how a hyper-militarized foreign policy, significantly driven by lobbying groups, drains resources and attention from said domestic issues. For instance, in 2023, Congress approved $14.3
billion in aid to Israel, with Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) alone receiving over $286,000 from pro-Israel groups since 1990 (OpenSecrets.org data). This aid often comes at the expense of U.S. infrastructure, healthcare, and education—the very things that might actually reverse decline. Instead, we are presented with hand-wringing analyses that ignore the direct correlation between perpetual war-funding
and a decaying homeland. It's almost as if pointing fingers at the lobbyists and politicians who funnel taxpayer money into foreign conflicts would disrupt a very comfortable cottage industry for certain pundits. One might wonder: how can America be 'great again' when its leaders are more beholden to foreign interests and military-industrial profits than to its own citizens' well-being? It's not a
mystery, it's a deliberate choice, heavily subsidized.