So I should pay money to foreign countries and foreign wars under threat of violence, if I don’t pay I will have my assets seized or even go to prison? We’re 30 trillion dollars in debt and still think this is a good idea?
The money paid to foreign countries is economic diplomacy, and is inexpensive compared to actual military diplomacy. A good part of the reason you are able to earn what you do is because of the US' might in both economic and military influence.
I agree that the military budget is problematic, but it's short sighted to spend too much time worrying about foreign aid. It's a very cheap way to wield influence.
> In 1970 countries agreed to give at least 0.7% of GNI [0] and the US has been giving severely less than that for decades
The US and nearly everybody else. The biggest exceptions most recently? Sweden, Luxembourg, Norway. Gee, I just can't figure out why the US doesn't match Norway (or other tiny hyper affluent European nations) on such a matter. The only real exceptional outcomes in that list are Britain and Germany, and France to a lesser degree - outside of that the entire world is largely failing badly at that supposed test.
Meanwhile during that time the US supplied nearly half the world's food aid, while only representing 4%-5% of its population. A tradition of food aid going back more than a century now.
For example:
"The U.S. contributed $3.4 billion to WFP [UN World Food Program] in 2019, which was 42% of all contributions last year." - from the UN WFP homepage. And that's just to one entity.
Globally at present the US is supplying around 40% of the world's food aid all by itself (the number used to be slightly higher in the past and I think the US should do more, however that's still astounding coming from one nation).
You know what the US should do? It should pull its military entirely out of Europe and Asia, and let Russia and China run wild (they'd promptly conquer and pillage like it was the 1930s all over again). North Korea would be in South Korea before the final US troops were out of Asia; South Korea would cease to exist as we know it today within a decade. Then we should cut that related defense spending, and redirect that former defense expenditure to meeting that 0.7% GNI target (and helping the people ravaged by the inevitable large wars, which is how we used to approach the problem circa the WW1 & WW2 eras).
Food aid is basically the US subsidizing its own food producers and dumping free food in countries, thus undermining the already-poor farmers. It's not as charitable as you make it sound, and it has a lot of negative outcomes. If the US was interested in helping the people there, it would use different approaches.
I agree that the military budget is problematic, but it's short sighted to spend too much time worrying about foreign aid. It's a very cheap way to wield influence.