I don't know why you're asking me to answer questions that are clearly personal to you, and have no objective answer.

All I can say is, probably not none.

And maybe a note on diminishing returns, in that we might want to reflect on the eradication of smallpox and the near total eradication of polio, and what it has meant to you and to your community to not really have to worry about those diseases.

I don't know how my community benefits from worldwide eradication of those diseases more than just US-only eradication along with rigorous border controls stopping smallpox-infected people from visiting. Again, considering the cost along with the benefit.

How much are you willing to pay for screening a very long list of diseases - both in administrative costs and traveler time wasted? Will you be quarantining citizens too, as some infections have an incubation period before they can be detected - who will pay for all of that? How many tourism dollars will be lost due to this additional friction?

Now that we have established you're willing to pay to prevent diseases spreading to the US, why do you think that screening at the border is superior to reducing the worldwide incidence, or eradicating them and never having to screen for them ever again?

There is no upper bound here. The eradication of smallpox is money saved and suffering prevented every day for as long as humans are around.

Border screening clearly has a high failure rate, our recent experiences with this should be fresh in your mind. Besides threatening public health domestically, outbreaks in foreign nations are nevertheless a major economic liability. If COVID had never left China, we would still have seen a huge worldwide disruption, for example.

And anyway, screw them, we got ours is a shit perspective. Empathy should be part of the conversation when talking about so much suffering and death.

"No upper bound" is not a serious policy position. Sorry, I can't engage that.

Merkel disagreed.

And yet, it is obviously true.

This may surprise you, but US citizens travel. And US citizens get sick in other countries. Unless you want to argue that we should take away rights from US citizens and either prevent them from entering the country, unlawfully detain them or prevent them from leaving.

We absolutely can and should bar US citizens from entry back into the US while sick. This is not illegal. It is in fact a very old and accepted form of disease control, commonly called "quarantine".

You sure know the concept of incubation time. Barring infected persons from entering if they have no symptoms is not possible. And quarantining every single person who enters is also not possible.

Quarantine would only work in a society that respected the whole nearly as much as the individual, which you would know if you had been alive in 2020.

Who's going to pay for the quarantines - the same overburdened taxpayers you were concerned about?

Worked so well for covid

I'm not going to pay for quarantine. I'd like my tax dollars to go elsewhere, per your recommendation. Maybe you can make a charitable donation instead?

Sure man, just win the next election and have your people do exactly that

I'm sure you would be happy and reasonable about being quarantined every time you travel abroad. You wouldn't complain at all.

With RFK you're going to see huge populations of unvaccinated, border control won't help in that scenario with how contagious it is, but immigrants will provide a scapegoat. RFK is probably going to push for removing MMR vaccine requirements for legal immigrants too. His organization got many killed in American Samoa from measles.

Ah yes because covid was stopped so well

Because we can't opt out of taxes that fund this.

If it is clearly personal and you do not have an objective answer then let this be a cause we can choose to donate to based on our personal assessment.

Out of curiosity, what cost do you believe that you currently personally bear for this?

How much should I bear or how much do I actually bear?

I should bear 0 cost.

It looks like US Foreign Aid is ~1% of the Fed budget, so 1% of my taxes. So again, too much.

How much would you pay to not get Ebola or another haemorrhagic disease, should it find it's way into your community? How much are you willing to pay to hedge against that risk by squelching outbreaks near the source?

Absolutely willing to pay for this. What % of the budget goes to that? Do I need to accept everything else to get this service or can I just whitelist this line item?

> Do I need to accept everything else to get this service or can I just whitelist this line item?

It's a bundled deal, sorry. It's not just governments that avoid admin overheads - no auto insurance I know will let you pick which specific impacts to insure against a la carte, just to reduce your premiums.

Also, no 2 people will ever agree on the same government spend (to the nearest million), so I don't see the point of your exercise to personally quantify how ones tax dollars should be directed. The point of having a representative government is so that individual citizens don't need referendum on how much to pay for toilet paper at an USAF base in Japan, or disease reconnaissance in central Africa - but both things benefit US citizens (broadly speaking) and need to be done, so congress allocates the money.

>It's a bundled deal, sorry.

And this is why Trump turned it all off. The bundled deal is not working for too many voters. They want Trump to negotiate a new deal on their behalf.

> They want Trump to negotiate a new deal on their behalf.

I am certain they'll get the deal they deserve. For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong

Um yes? I am convinced you’re a child with how you think everyone can line pick their own items and only those and somehow that works or would provide enough for the causes lmao. It’s like the people who only wanted 1 or 2 channels and they then realized how much those actually cost without everyone subsidizing.

Yes it's called private services. For instance there are no public roads for miles where I live, so I rented backhoe and made them. There is no police, so I learned how to defend myself. There is no water, so we drilled a well. The whole of public services can be privatized into line items.

Until you grow up and learn how a neighbor can poison the ground water and you’re fucked.

im not willing to pay anything for you not getting ebola. you have to pay the lot for everyone to keep yourself from getting ebola

no thanks I'll take my chances with the ebola

If you don't want to participate in society, why are you even on the internet?

I do want to participate in society. I don't want to fund the rest of the world.

The US is the wealthiest country in the world, and the US got to that place by having these programs in place.

Who makes shoes/other goods, mines the earth, or other dangerous work? The people in those poor countries. These programs are often the stepping stone that western countries use to enter countries and "develop the economy" in these areas to the benefit of everyone. Developing the economy brings jobs then brings peace. Then the cost of goods stays down.

Fewer orphans. More experience treating diseases. More stable economies to exchange goods and services with.

Very likely these programs pay for themselves via your taxes via price of goods and services. Entirely ignoring the moral good

The US got to this place by winning a world war with virtually no negative impact to our own country. We were literally the last ones standing.

All of these programs came after we established our position.

America won a world war because Europe, Russia did a lot of the early heavily lifting of and because the USA was already an economic and industrial power?

Europe and Russia were the ones killing each other and destroying each others' economies. So yeah I guess they did the "heavy lifting".

England basically destroyed the Luftwaffe and the Soviets took care of most of the Germans during the attempted invasion of Russia. So yeah, I think they did more than their fare share. Are you saying they didn’t ?

>At what cost?

$14.03 per American per year.

He’s just too poor I guess.

Step back and listen to yourself.

Cost is a fundamental part of the human experience. We need to ask that question on every single human action (singular or collective). There are no free lunches.

A good number of us have said "yeah, that cost seems worth it", and you act like your opinion is the only one that should matter.

It would appear that more voters think the cost is too high.

Don't play dumb. Most voters are woefully uninformed and had no idea what actual policy would be enacted.

Of course they didn't know the exact policy mechanism, basically no one did (even well-informed, high-IQ voters). We voted for Trump because he promised massive disruption to the status quo.

> basically no one did (even well-informed, high-IQ voters).

The policy mechanisms that are coming into play today were the ones proposed in Project 2025. We had been talking about this for months before the election.

You being alive right now is very likely a cost that the collective we could have decided to do without. Clean water, the suppression of diseases that'd wipe out entire populaces... Without those, you should likely have died before you were 5. You know what, I think you're right, you should have died before your 5th birthday.

The entire foreign aid budget is like 75 bucks an American a year. You probably pay less than that.

Off by an order of magnitude, but even if you were right, it's too much.

OMG - you mean you are losing sleep over $75? You know how pathetic you sound?

Try telling that to the IRS if you underpay. It's just $75, what is their problem?

Assuming you’re an American, approximately 0.2% of your income goes to healthcare and similar assistance for people outside the US if you pay 20% tax rate.

It's turtles all the way down. 0.2% here, 0.2% there, do it 100 times and you save a lot of money. Gutting foreign freebies is an easy starting point, not the end.

It's a great way to get rid of the American Empire that we've built up.

I mean, you aren't going to like playing second fiddle to China, but that's the choice you are making right now.

That tracks with what I said elsewhere in this thread, ~1%. It's too much, cut it off.

You get a LOT in return from that, think about how much you benefit from food and other goods made in those countries. Such an ignorant comment.

I actually don't think I get much in return for that.