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Nov. 22, 2006 On December 9, 2002, The Christian Science Monitor carried an article by its own staff writer, David R. Francis, entitled, “Economist Tallies Swelling Cost of Israel to US.” According to the article, Thomas Stauffer, a Washington, D.C. consulting economist, had recently estimated that the total cost of supporting Israel that had been borne by the US from 1973-2002 was in the neighborhood of $1,600,000,000,000, that is, one trillion, six hundred billion dollars. Probably most people are aware of the fact that Israel was the prime recipient of US foreign aid in those decades, usually receiving a sum of around $3 billion annually earmarked as military and economic development assistance. So the total aid package for those years would have come scarcely to $100 billion, about 6% of the figure put forth by Stauffer. But Stauffer ferreted out all the intentionally and unintentionally concealed forms of additional aid, as well as the losses suffered by the US due to its espousal of its Israel-first policy. These additional losses and gifts include elevated oil prices, loss of arms sales to Arab countries because of Israeli objections, discounts on excess military equipment sold to Israel, US guarantees for Israeli borrowing, private gifts to Israel from US philanthropies, profitable technical information, peace-gifts on behalf of Israel to Egypt and Jordan, and other items. Stauffer does not put a dollar figure on technical information gotten by Israeli espionage in the US, as in the Jonathan Pollard case. It goes without saying that many voices in the Israel Lobby pretend to have debunked Stauffer’s figures, but if we regard Stauffer’s figures as instructive generalities or probabilities rather than documented hard-and-fast statistics, they do seem to fall in line with an unbiased view of the matter. A typical argument against Stauffer’s estimates is that US private giving to Israel should not be taken into consideration. But that argument is fallacious, because the philanthropists generally made their fortunes on the open market, as, for example, in the film industry and the media. Had they settled for less lucrative profits, they’d have charged less for their services, and their customers, who are the same people as US taxpayers, would have been left with more money in their pockets, just as if Congress had lowered taxes. So it’s the same thing either way. Anyway, here is a link to the article: http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1209/p16s01-wmgn.html Notice that the article came out before the misbegotten invasion of Iraq that George W. Bush undertook in order to gratify his Zionist masters. We should now add the cost of the war in Iraq and perturbations in the US economy attendant on it, like still-higher oil prices, to Stauffer’s preliminary figures. With the cost of war now approaching $350 billion, we can see that the total Israel tab now ascends to the neighborhood of $2 trillion. That’s $6666 per American, or $26,666 per American family of four. Here’s an article on the recently deceased Thomas R. Stauffer: http://www.wrmea.com/archives/May-June_2005/0505041.html ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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