Americans deserve a corruption rebate
It’s the age of the consumer: Overnight delivery. Free shipping. And social media justice for any organization that disserves the customer.
It’s time for the U.S. government to make right with the taxpayers who fund it. Uncle Sam no longer serves the American taxpayer. It serves dictators on President Trump’s favorites list, along with Trump’s customers in the private sector and Trump’s own family members. Americans are no longer getting their money’s worth from the Trump administration. They deserve a corruption rebate. Hashtag #CorruptionRebate.
About 97 million households pay income tax in the United States. Let’s start the corruption rebate at $500 per household. That’s in the ballpark of the stimulus checks the last Republican president, George W. Bush, sent out in 2008. And it would require $48.5 billion in new funding.
Shouldn’t be a problem. Saudi Arabia is perhaps the top beneficiary of President Trump’s corruption, including his coddling of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Sultan, execution-orderer of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump’s policy is to exit the Middle East and remove all U.S. troops from the region—except for Saudi Arabia, where he’s planning to send an additional 2,000 to guard oil facilities the Saudis apparently can’t guard themselves.
There should be two elements to the #SaudiCorruptionRebate. The first should go to U.S. service members being sent to Saudi Arabia as a Trump contribution to MBS’s Praetorian guard. They should be paid at the mercenary rate, not the soldier rate. Private security contractors earn $500 a day or more, which is a minimum of $182,500 per year. A mid-grade noncommissioned officer earns about $32,000 per year. Let’s round up by $500 and give every U.S. service member Trump is loaning to his pal MBS a $150,000 raise.
For 2,000 U.S. troops, that would only cost $300 million per year. Piece of cake. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund has assets of $320 billion, so the Saudis could pay their U.S. mercenaries with less than 1% of the annual return on their financial holdings. That wouldn’t even bite into principal.
Let’s say the Saudis paid half the standard #corruptionrebate for all the rest of us who pay U.S. taxes. That would be around $24 billion per year, less than 10% of the Saudi wealth fund. There’s another option, if the Saudis want to leave the fund intact: Give every U.S. taxpayer a stake in the upcoming IPO of the giant state-run oil company, Saudi Aramco, worth an estimated $2 trillion. The so-called kingdom could give every taxpaying American household shares worth $250 in the oil giant, totaling less than 2.5% of the company’s value. Seems like a pittance given that Saudi Arabia would be overrun by Iran without Americans to intervene.