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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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?
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When we hit a point of diminishing returns do I still need to pay incrementally more into this?