Cut Foreign Aid Budget Now

Thehill.com ^ | 03/29/2011 | Dick Morris

[joesjane]

As the CR talks between the House Republicans and the administration and Senate Democrats near their deadline, the House negotiators should put America’s foreign aid budget on the table.

[joesjane]

This article addresses a topic that I have been stewing about for a long time. Why do we send all this money in aid overseas to people who hate us and use the money to kill Americans? I would love to see most foreign aid stopped. The article also has a nice list of which countries receive what amount at the bottom.

[Ted Grant]

Foreign aid isn’t the problem. An elderly woman I know once called me out of the blue to complain about how ‘all this foreign aid’ was bankrupting us. I told her the truth: the aid isn’t much, relatively speaking, and stuff like Obamacare would bankrupt us 30x faster. That was OK according to her, somehow, because she felt healthcare should be free.

And that mentality is the real root of the problem.

[joesjane]

I guess I am at the complete opposite end of the spectrum, I want absolutely nothing to be free. Aid is just that, our hard earned money sent to a bunch of primative animals for free. I understand that programs like obamacare are larger but I want it all stopped.

[Niuhuru]

Uhm no, foreign aid IS a problem. Put frankly, it’s not jsut a yearly amount, but over the DECADES we have spent on Africa, amounts to trillions we could have spent here in the US on schooling, health, our military, and I am more than sure that we wouldn’t have half hte problems we do now. We could have more than affordable schooling and more than affordable healthcare and money to build a solid fence, but do we? NO! We need to not just cut it, but eliminate it entirely.

[Steelfish]

Cut the State Department Budget by half and halve the pensions of retired career diplomats. Enuf is enuf.

[Ted Grant]

I agree with you. But the problem is that a lot of people want their stuff but want to cut other forms of government spending. As long as too many people have that immature mentality, our side fights an uphill battle.

In this context, even if we did away with ‘all this foreign aid,’ as my friend passionately insisted, it wouldn’t make us any more solvent any sooner. It really isn’t that much money.

It’s kind of like having massive bleeding on the stub of an arm that’s been blown off, but the medic is transfixed on setting a broken pinky on the other limb.

If the host is going to survive, the broken pinky can wait. Deal with the heavy bleeding. If that ain’t fixed, the pinky won’t mattr.

[Ted Grant]

I’m not sure that we have given trillions to African countries alone. In recent years, total non-military foreign aid has been around $30 billion annually, and I don’t think in years prior it had been remarkably greater.

Do you have a credible source for the assertion that US foreign aid to African nation totals trillions of dollars over several decades?

Foreign aid is an easy thing to criticize. And I tend to agree, when times are tough it should be scaled back. We shouldn’t borrow money to give it away, that’s for sure. But I wouldn’t overstate it, either.

[ex-snook]

"This article addresses a topic that I have been stewing about for a long time."

Those in Washington make few objections to cutting money we spend for other countries. However there is a lot of howling about money spent on Americans. Go figure.