Thread: U.S. is a Foreign Aid Cheapskate According to NY Times

Editorial from today's Nuevo York Slimes....get ready to spew your coffee...

Crumbs for Africa


Published: June 8, 2005

President Bush kept a remarkably straight face yesterday when he strode to the microphones with Britain's prime minister, Tony Blair, and told the world that the United States would now get around to spending $674 million in emergency aid that Congress had already approved for needy countries. That's it. Not a penny more to buy treated mosquito nets to help save the thousands of children in Sierra Leone who die every year of preventable malaria. Nothing more to train and pay teachers so 11-year-old girls in Kenya may go to school. And not a cent more to help Ghana develop the programs it needs to get legions of young boys off the streets.
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Mr. Blair, who will be the host when the G-8, the club of eight leading economic powers, holds its annual meeting next month, is trying to line up pledges to double overall aid for Africa over the next 10 years. That extra $25 billion a year would do all those things, and much more, to raise the continent from dire poverty. Before getting to Washington, Mr. Blair had done very well, securing pledges of large increases from European Union members.

According to a poll, most Americans believe that the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 percent. As Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist in charge of the United Nations' Millennium Project, put it so well, the notion that there is a flood of American aid going to Africa "is one of our great national myths."

The United States currently gives just 0.16 percent of its national income to help poor countries, despite signing a United Nations declaration three years ago in which rich countries agreed to increase their aid to 0.7 percent by 2015. Since then, Britain, France and Germany have all announced plans for how to get to 0.7 percent; America has not. The piddling amount Mr. Bush announced yesterday is not even 0.007 percent.

What is 0.7 percent of the American economy? About $80 billion. That is about the amount the Senate just approved for additional military spending, mostly in Iraq. It's not remotely close to the $140 billion corporate tax cut last year.

This should not be the image Mr. Bush wants to project around a world that is intently watching American actions on this issue. At a time when rich countries are mounting a noble and worthy effort to make poverty history, the Bush administration is showing itself to be completely out of touch by offering such a miserly drop in the bucket. It's no surprise that Mr. Bush's offer was greeted with scorn in television broadcasts and newspaper headlines around the world. "Bush Opposes U.K. Africa Debt Plan," blared the headline on the AllAfrica news service, based in Johannesburg. "Blair's Gambit: Shame Bush Into Paying," chimed in The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia.

The American people have a great heart. President Bush needs to stop concealing it.

By the time foreign aid gets distributed and the employees of government and nongovernment agencies get their salaries etc I always doubt how much ever gets to those who really need it?

One mile from the US Embassy Bogota, Colombia is a slum where the displaced people from the civil war live. How much US AID ever gets to them? Boys on a cart pulled by a horse pick through garbage just a block away.

I am very cynical about this but I question CARE, WORLD VISION and a lot of the television fund raisers too! The CEOS of these outfits are being paid salaries in the six figure range often as high as $500,000.

The poor stay poor!

you know my sister worked for the red cross and she told me that only 10% of donations actually goes to the people in need. Hell, my sister also got a ton of free food. Whatever was left after deliveries, she took home. Too give you an idea of how much free food you got-let's put it this way, she never had to buy groceries. She even talked about how all she had to do was go up to where she used to work to get a turkey. I told her I thought she was abusing priviledges and that the organization should not be tolerating that. Can't you tell we get along great?