Donald Trump says he pulled out of the World Health Organization because it's unfair to the US. We pay dues of $500 million per year while China pays only $39 million. Bob Somerby wants a fact check.
Sure, why not. WHO works on a two-year budgeting cycle, so I've cut the numbers in half to get annual figures:
Hmmm. What's going on? Well, these are only the assessed contributions, which countries are required to pay. The US also makes voluntary contributions to programs it has a special interest in, like infectious diseases and polio eradication. When you add that in, we contribute a lot more:
Both of these figures are correct. You can use whichever one you want. But the US isn't required to pay $500 million per year. We do it freely.
POSTSCRIPT: Overall, the US pays about 14% of the WHO's budget. We account for a little more than 25% of the world's GDP.
Donald Trump says he pulled out of the World Health Organization because it's unfair to the US.
LOL. Donald Trump doesn't like the WHO because COVID was VERY UNFAIR to HIM, and the WHO went along with it.
(And also I guess because being against anything scientific or international appeals to his
shockingly stupidlow-informationcultistssupporters.)Ahh, yes, it's so unfair that we gave to a charity, basically.
What?
Not to mention, $500 million is 0.0025% of US GDP.
That's almost a dollar and a half for every American. With apologies to Everett Dirksen: "A dollar and a half here, a dollar and a half there, pretty soon you have enough for a cup of coffee."
Not so soon if Trump keeps up his tariff idiocy.
👆
Soon coffee will go the way of eggs. Expensive if you can get them.
All U.S. foreign aid, which includes all contributions to international organizations, is around one percent of the federal budget (70 billion vs. 7 trillion i.e. seven thousand billion). Most of it is voluntary, not mandatory, and much of it is military aid.
A "charity" that does a great job keeping infectious diseases from spreading.
Yeah, we had COVID, something our State Department knew about Dec. of 2019 (actually, before) and donnie completely blew off warnings leading to well over half a million deaths, due to donnie.
Now, WHO is helping protect the world and, of course, donnie is trying to defund them. donnie's tariffs aren't gonna stop a pandemic. In fact, it might make such worse.
Well, perhaps he thinks that it would be cheaper to fight infectious diseases
right here rather than pay the postage for vaccines to some foreign country.
Have you seen the cost of a Forever Stamp lately?
Stopped using snail mail some time ago. Email or FaceTime.
Donald Trump doesn’t think. He just lashes out. This is the onset of the hurricane. Debris is flying everywhere. Hopefully it will soon run out of steam and we can start cleaning up.
Corrected for inflation, the price of a stamp is pretty much in line with historical prices. It’s a little higher than it has been and a little lower than it has been.