Welfare for Foreign Nations

In the wake of several devastating hurricanes and with an ongoing war in Iraq that costs more than $1 billion per week, taxpayers might think Congress has better things to do with $21 billion than send it overseas as gifts. Yet that’s exactly what Congress did the first week of November 2005 by approving a foreign aid spending bill in yet another exercise of questionable sanity. Total federal debt has recently topped $8 trillion and a major US city was virtually destroyed only a few months ago. How many other programs come to mind that require immediate attention? What words would you use to describe a Congress that cares so little about its own taxpaying citizens while redistributing billions of American tax dollars to foreign nations – arguably like pouring so much sand down a rat hole. The return on this investment will be what? Peace in the Middle East? Arafat should be immortalized as the international poster child for foreign aid.

Consider just a few of the ways your 2005 tax money was used:

• $638 million for the unelected Musharraf government in Pakistan;
• $735 million to control dangerous drugs originating in South America;
• $150 million for development in Gaza, in addition to the millions the Palestinians receive every year;
• $110 million for the Middle East Partnership Initiative, ostensibly for economic development, although the recipient nations include oil-rich Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Why in the world are American taxpayers giving welfare to OPEC governments?
• Over $500 million for various republics in the former Soviet Union. Even as those nations spawn millionaires and even billionaires, Americans are expected to provide welfare for their poor.
• $95 million in new money for the United Nations Democracy Fund;
• $34 million for the pro-abortion United Nations Population Fund, which supports and funds nations like China in infanticide as a national policy;
• $440 million for international population planning;
• $80 million for the Global Environment Facility, run by the World Bank to fund anti-capitalist environmental projects around the world.

Constitutionally, of course, none of this spending is authorized. For repeated emphasis, none of this spending is authorized in the U.S. Constitution - but that doesn’t stop Congress. There is an even stronger moral case to be made against taking tax money from Americans, who are struggling to raise and educate a family, and giving it to foreign governments. Of course the money comes with stipulations but those technicalities are typically ignored. Foreign aid doesn’t help poor people in foreign countries; it helps foreign elites and US corporations who obtain the contracts doled out by those foreign elites. Everyone in Washington knows this, but the same lofty rhetoric is used over and over to sell foreign aid programs. Corporate welfare is bad enough, but nation welfare in the guise of helping poor foreigners abandoned by their own governments is (fill in the blank).

In many cases, foreign aid money simply distorts foreign economies and props up bad and oppressive governments. In countries that pursue harmful economic policies, an infusion of US cash only exacerbates and prolongs problems. No amount of money can help nations that reject property rights, free markets, and the rule of law. Now that we mention it, property rights – what are those again?

Since American foreign aid programs began in earnest decades ago, hundreds of billions of US tax dollars have been gifted to changing governments of nations around the globe. The utter failure of this money to change things for the better in those nations (or anywhere else) is no longer in question; most of the money never finds its way to alleviate any form of human suffering or business development. Even the most earnest advocates of foreign aid know that little is achieved other than buying loyalty to, and dependence on, America in such places as the United Nations and continuation of foreign military bases from which strategic interests can be safeguarded. Most recipient nations remain endlessly mired in poverty, political and legal corruption, and cultural malaise.

A rational person would argue that failed aid programs should be eliminated. In fact, it would be hard to identify a successful foreign aid program. In Washington, however, the solution to failed programs is that they get more money thrown at them. The rationale is that the only problem was that we didn’t give enough program money the first time or the second time. The American public deserves to know why there is room in the budget for $21 billion in foreign aid when American taxpayers face record budget deficits and so many national priorities go both unfunded and unresolved. Why, even anti-American groups supporting illegal immigration (La Raza) receive millions of tax dollars in federal subsidies.

If this is politics, then politics are badly broken, and Congressmen trying to fix it can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Has it finally become responsible to ask, "What you would call a politician with an IQ of 100?" Congress?

Red State Patriot

Posted January 23, 2006 02:57 AM
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