By Donald Hank
Conservatives know that Sen. Barack Obama has recently introduced the
Global Poverty Act, which some commentators have said would bankrupt
America by giving an additional 0.7 percent of GDP to Third World
governments.
That may well be true.
But as in the War on Poverty, we are not debating with people who have
any grasp of numbers or even reality. We are dealing with the left,
whose goal is to suppress debate over wealth distribution, suggesting
that anyone who opposes it is a Nazi.
So forget about whether the bill will break our bank and lead Americans
into poverty. They aren't listening. Neither are many "conservatives,"
many of whose pastors have told them that government-enforced socialist
wealth sharing (without calling it that) is Christian.
So it is futile to debate from the standpoint of harming the taxpayer.
Neither the far left nor the "Christian" right will hear you.
Instead, the debate over this bill must include a component that was
lacking in the debate over the War on Poverty, namely, to address the
consequences to the recipients themselves.
Now, in retrospect we know that welfare destroyed our inner cities,
particularly black society, in many ways, chief of which was the
monetary rewarding of irresponsible mothers who had children not out of
a desire for stable families, but because child rearing was personally
profitable to them, provided it was fatherless.
Those with stable families, with father present, lost their welfare
payments as mandated by the law. Thus they bowed to the wishes of their
feminist slaveholders, fruitfully churning out fatherless progeny.
You the taxpayer were paying people to live a dangerous lifestyle that
has led to black males having an enormous incarceration rate, up to 60
percent among male high school dropouts. These poor blacks (and also
many poor whites) had learned, from their present mothers and absent
fathers, the entitlement lesson, namely, that work is for suckers.
But during Lyndon Johnson's presidency, the conservative side of the
welfare debate focused solely on whether or not middle-class, mostly
white America could afford welfare. They lost because, for the most
part, they ignored the most devastating aspect: the foreseeable adverse
effects on the poor.
Now, in this second debate, over global welfare, we can learn from our
past omission and maybe stop the disaster before it happens, by
focusing the debate not on how we the taxpayer will be hit, but on the
foreseeable consequences to the recipients.
We now have an unexpected ally in that debate.
A recent exhaustive literature survey by Simeon Djankov, an expert on
development aid and member of the World Bank, entitled "The Curse of
Aid," shows:
Based on panel data for 108 recipient countries in the period 1960 to
1999, we find that foreign aid has a negative impact on institutions.
In particular, if the foreign aid over GDP that a country receives over
a period of five years reaches the 75th percentile in the sample, then
a 10-point index of democracy is reduced between 0.5 and almost 1
point, a large effect. For comparison, we also measure the effect of
oil rents on political institutions. We find that aid is a bigger curse
than oil.
This author will be hard for liberal-progressives to ignore, since he
is embedded in one of their own institutions. Thus they must face the
reality that if aid hurts democracy, then the greater the amounts, the
greater the hurt, and not only to the taxpayer – who will probably
survive the debacle the way white America survived the War on Poverty –
but also to black Africa, where democracy is still a straw to be
clutched at.
Incredibly, in a footnote of his paper, Djankov says that targeting aid
to countries that comply with democratic guidelines is banned by the
U.N. Thus, not only is the aid given without strings attached that
would encourage democracy, but worse, strings that would make it
effective in helping democratize the Third World are banned. The people
who control the organization that Obama yearns to sacrifice your (but
especially your children's) wealth to are leftists who start out with
ready-made conclusions about wealth sharing, ideologically based
conclusions that have nothing to do with studies or anything else
related to reality.
But the far left isn't the main problem today. Americans are
increasingly enamored of the failed idea of forcing the working class
to give to the poor, and not because of academe, the media or other
secular institutions, but in large part because of their religious
leaders, including "America's pastor," who actually urge Christians to
support world socialism schemes like the Global Peace Plan.
These strange "Christians" despise their flocks, ignoring that
Christians have been voluntarily giving of their own substance to the
poor for 2,000 years, without relying on government for help to do so.
And they ignore the biblical mandate to give in love, not extort gifts
from helpless taxpayers.
Thus, they fly in the face of Paul's words:
And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor… and have not charity
(love), it profiteth me nothing. – I Corinthians 3:13
Beyond that, by politicizing charity and impoverishing Americans (to
the tune of over $10,000 per person), the Global Poverty Act would make
it more difficult for Christians to continue being the most generous
people in the world. Instead, we would make them unwilling donors to
the world's most corrupt charity, the U.N.
What can you do?
Send a link to this column to as many people as you can.
Then call your senator and tell him/her that Obama's global welfare
plan will hurt black Africans just as national welfare hurt black
Americans.
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Obama's foreign aid corrupts absolutely
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