Just consider that if you take away the cost of the Iraq war, plus the cost of the “son of the Iraq war,” the Afghan war, and the annual aid to Egypt to keep it from attacking Israel, and the corresponding annual subsidies to Israel (about $10,000 in free money per family – now a half-century-old tradition), loose money that also helps facilitate the never-ending construction of disruptive new Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories, and our annual humanitarian aid to help care for the Israeli-displaced Palestinians, you will find that our national debt actually is zero – zilch, nada.

How did this come to be? Well, we let the wealthy ex-Cuban mafia in Miami buy, through political contributions, our policy toward Cuba, a clear fiasco. And we let the wealthy oil industry take us into a debilitating and costly war over Iraqi oil.

And we let the wealthy Jewish lobby, which I understand is about 10 lobbyists per U.S. congressional representative, maintain veto rights over virtually every Middle East policy and in the process assure our never-ending annual economic and military contributions to only Israeli ends.

Clearly blindly catering to wealthy and thus influential self-serving minority interests has not served the United States well as a whole.

So how and why do they do it? They buy politicians, and that leads to bigger money with mainstream America, middle-class America, the big sucker and loser. And listen to Sen. Ted Cruz when he says, “I only care about what my own constituency thinks.”

Listening to minority groups is one thing, but adopting foreign policies based on just their self-interests is destroying the nation and the middle class.

Jim Hanks

Durango