U.S. To Spend $230 Million to Upgrade F-16s…In Pakistan

Do we not have enough financial worries in this country without giving away millions of dollars to upgrade another country’s military?

The White House confirmed Thursday that it wants to shift 230 million dollars in aid to Pakistan from counter-terrorism programs to upgrading Islamabad’s ageing F-16 fighter jets.

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White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said a New York Times article detailing the shift was “accurate,” but rejected criticism that Pakistan chiefly views the jets through the lens of its nuclear rivalry with neighbor India.

“The F-16s that they have are used in counter-terrorism operations. We made them available to the Pakistanis and they need to be maintained,” Perino told reporters.

Pakistan’s new government “is facing a lot of pressure from a severe fiscal situation” stemming partly from soaring food and energy costs, and “they need assistance from the United States,” the spokeswoman said.

Read that again. Pakistan is facing pressure from food and energy prices, so we need to give them $230 million.

By the way, our national debt, as of this writing, sits at $9.5 TRILLION, and increases “an average of $1.74 billion per day.” You know, I would rather that they took that $230 million dollars and gave it out in bonuses to our military. For that matter, give a couple million to service members like Ty Ziegel. But don’t give my money to Pakistan.

And don’t forget the $54 trillion time bomb:

Here the news is quite sobering. The U.S. has $1.6 trillion in assets and $10.8 trillion in liabilities, resulting in a negative net worth of $9.2 trillion as of the end of its Sept. 30, 2007, fiscal year. Of those liabilities, $5.1 trillion is owed to the public. Another $4.8 trillion is owed for federal employees and veteran benefits. The killer item, however, is $45 trillion in off-balance-sheet debt, which is the present value of future benefits owed for Medicare and Social Security.

As Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, UBS, HSBC and others recently discovered with their structured investment vehicles, these liabilities should be treated as real balance sheet liabilities. For the U.S., that would mean a net debt of $54 trillion, a figure 3.9 times our revenues, if we consider our $14 trillion economy as our figure for “sales.”

Yeah, we pretty much have money to give away.