Alternative Fact: NATO countries owe money for defence expenditures the US has made.<\/p>\n
Real Fact:\u00a0The\u00a0target<\/strong> was for member nations to devote 2% of GDP to defence spending. A target is not a\u00a0guarantee. Not meeting a target may be disappointing, but it doesn’t mean you owe someone money. If your\u00a0target<\/em> is to donate 5% of your net income to charity … but at the end of the year have only managed 3%, it does not mean you owe charities 2% of your net income! It means you didn’t meet your goal. Consistently missing goals can also be a clue that the goal is not realistic. Take, for instance, someone whose goal is to donate 80% of their net income to charity. But they also pay their rent\/mortgage, buy some food, turn the lights on occasionally. And don’t have 80% of their net income available after covering essentials. The person can commit to the goal and evaluate their other spending (move into a smaller residence, buy cheaper food,\u00a0conserve on utilities) or they can change their goal to meet the 10% of their net income that is actually discretionary.<\/p>\n Another real fact?\u00a0NATO countries, by and large, fund their own\u00a0military. One\u00a0might<\/em> make the argument that the US would have been able to scale back\u00a0the military budget if only other partners increased their expenditures. *But* that’s disingenuous from someone\u00a0seeking an enormous increase in the military budget\u00a0whilst questioning the nation’s continued commitment to NATO. But even if the ‘target’ was actually a contractual obligation … it would be to NATO and not the US.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Alternative Fact: NATO countries owe money for defence expenditures the US has made. Real Fact:\u00a0The\u00a0target was for member nations to devote 2% of GDP to defence spending. A target is not a\u00a0guarantee. Not meeting a target may be disappointing, but it doesn’t mean you owe someone money. If your\u00a0target is to donate 5% of your …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,41],"tags":[84,210],"class_list":["post-1172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","category-politics","tag-alternativefact","tag-nato"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1172"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1173,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1172\/revisions\/1173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}