Brain Kemp Using Georgia Tax Dollars to Fund Middle East War

There are good things about not hav­ing a Speak­er of the House in DC. For exam­ple, while DC Repub­li­cans and Republican/Uniparty mem­bers strug­gle to elect a speak­er, very for­tu­nate­ly, the US Con­gress is unable to appro­pri­ate funds to kill peo­ple and destroy things in for­eign lands. I call that a win. 

As I wrote in my recent piece, “Israel War With Hamas, Not About Hatred-Win­ners and losers, not who you think,” while the indi­vid­u­als fight­ing on all sides of this Mid­dle East con­flict are the true losers, those who prof­it from prop­er­ty destruc­tion and per­son­al suf­fer­ing and death are the undoubt­ed win­ners. You might remem­ber these graphs depict­ing stock prices for a few US defense con­trac­tors over the last six months, hav­ing dropped pre­cip­i­tous­ly dur­ing that time: 

Pre­vi­ous­ly, I point­ed to the uptick at the end, the gain in stock prices occur­ring simul­ta­ne­ous­ly to the Hamas attack. 

Well, now let’s look at those graphs again using the infor­ma­tion that has accu­mu­lat­ed since war broke out, but also since con­gress has been unable to arrive at a selec­tion for House Speaker: 

Notice the recent swoon over the past two weeks. That is because with­out a speak­er, spend­ing leg­is­la­tion can­not advance. While con­gress has no speak­er, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment can­not spend your mon­ey to break things and hurt peo­ple. Ulti­mate­ly, that means that with­out con­gress feed­ing tax dol­lars to sup­port war, war would even­tu­al­ly have to stop. Imag­ine that! 

We talked about all this in my ear­li­er arti­cle, that the attack by Hamas on Israel occurred the very night of which, ear­li­er in the day, con­gres­sion­al approval for for Ukraine mil­i­tary sup­port fund­ing “col­lapsed.”

The Hamas attack halt­ed the pre­cip­i­tous stock price decreas­es in vir­tu­al­ly every major Amer­i­can defense stock. As you can see, stocks imme­di­ate­ly rebound­ed, soar­ing upward. They remained soar­ing upward UNTIL it became evi­dent that arriv­ing at a speak­er to pre­side over addi­tion­al defense appro­pri­a­tions and for­eign aid might be more dif­fi­cult than orig­i­nal­ly expect­ed. At that point, defense stocks tilt­ed into a notice­able “speak­er swoon.” And that is where we remain today. Unless the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment can arrange to take dol­lars from your grand­chil­dren, for their grandchildren’s grand­chil­dren to pay back one hun­dred years from now, defense con­trac­tors will not be able to make their share­hold­ers hap­py. And if share­hold­ers are not hap­py, they will part with their shares, result­ing, once again, in anoth­er pre­cip­i­tous fall in stock prices. 

But there is noth­ing we real­ly can do about any of that, is there? Well, prob­a­bly not. Even so, that doesn’t mean the tax­pay­ers of Geor­gia won’t do their part to help gin-up a few extra defense indus­try sales to help out those stock­hold­ers. Take Gov­er­nor Bri­an Kemp, for exam­ple. He’s sit­ting on pile of tax­pay­er cash right now, report­ed­ly around 11 bil­lion dollars…ahem, that’s 11 BILLION DOLLARS, friends. That’s your money. 

Well, Gov­er­nor Kemp has to be a good stew­ard of all that mon­ey com­ing from “hard-work­ing Geor­gians,” doesn’t he? Sure he does. After all, that 11 bil­lion in cash rep­re­sents $1000 the State of Geor­gia has over-taxed each of those hard-work­ing Geor­gians. That’s why Georgia’s gov­er­nor just invest­ed $10 mil­lion of your mon­ey in Israeli War Bonds. Accord­ing to the Gov­er­nor’s office, “the $10 mil­lion amount was the high­est avail­able on the mar­ket and brings Geor­gia’s cur­rent invest­ment in Israel via bonds to $25 mil­lion.” Of course, we shouldn’t choose to sup­port a war in the Mid­dle East with any­thing less than the MAXIMUM we can donate, should we? And when you’re sit­ting on $11 bil­lion in tax­pay­er cash, what’s a few mil­lion anyway? 

Accord­ing to the Governor, 

I have a ques­tion. Since when did Geor­gia cit­i­zens autho­rize their gov­er­nor to loan mon­ey to for­eign gov­ern­ments to wage war on their per­ceived ene­mies? Is there a law some­where on Geor­gia books allow­ing that to hap­pen? I mean, sure­ly there are some Pales­tin­ian sym­pa­thiz­ers some­where among Geor­gia tax­pay­ers. Are they OK with dol­lars they con­tribute to the gen­er­al fund being used to help rain destruc­tion and death on those with whom they feel kin­ship? I doubt that very much. And where will Israel obtain the mon­ey to pay back those war bonds? But, of course, from Amer­i­can tax­pay­ers’ grandchildren’s grand­chil­dren. Those poor souls, not even hatched yet, are the ones pay­ing for all of this. 

With that loan of cash, Geor­gia tax­pay­ers, com­plete­ly by them­selves, bought 500 “iron dome” mis­siles for Israel. They were pur­chased from the Amer­i­can defense indus­try. The col­lat­er­al for that $25 mil­lion loan from Gov­er­nor Kemp, mean­ing those 500 mis­siles, was destroyed in the first hours of the conflict. 

There is some­thing I do not under­stand here. Why does Geor­gia have a role in this war at all? Admin­is­ter­ing US for­eign pol­i­cy and fund­ing for­eign wars are nowhere found in the Geor­gia Con­sti­tu­tion. Accord­ing to the US Con­sti­tu­tion, that func­tion is restrict­ed sole­ly to the exec­u­tive depart­ment of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. And the idea that Israel will pay back those bonds is laugh­able. Israel, with­out Amer­i­can fund­ing, doesn’t even exist. We may not be able to do much about the US Fed­er­al Gov­ern­ment exec­u­tive using his pre­rog­a­tive to sup­port for­eign gov­ern­ments wag­ing war against their cho­sen ene­mies, but the tax­pay­ers of Geor­gia hav­ing their state trea­sury raid­ed for the same pur­pose is in the least an exam­ple of tax­pay­er dou­ble-jeop­ardy, and at most, just anoth­er exam­ple of moral bank­rupt­cy in government. 

There is much no one will ever know con­cern­ing the oper­a­tion of the levers of Geor­gia Gov­ern­ment. I’m sure there are oth­er gov­er­nors who have done things just as bad. But when you con­sid­er all that this gov­er­nor has done, not only against the best inter­ests of Geor­gians, but also against the inter­ests of all Amer­i­can tax­pay­ers and the world in gen­er­al, giv­en a Repub­li­can leg­is­la­ture, I can’t even imag­ine a Gov­er­nor Sta­cy Abrams being this bad.