Every time I read about a new speech given by candidates Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale, I shudder to think how much it’s going to cost us all in additional taxes.
In what was described as a major speech on U.S. foreign policy, Senator Mondale recently charged America with lacking a “proper concern for the so-called third world” and with being “indifferent to people seeking greater justice.” He berated us because there are half a billion people now living on the edge of starvation and accused us of being “insensitive” to “international economic security.”
In all recorded history, there has never been anything to compare to the sensitive outpouring of American dollars to help the needy and less fortunate around the rest of the world. The generous American taxpayers have given away more than $200 billion to more than 100 foreign countries.
The original purpose of foreign aid was to stop the advance of Communism. When President Harry Truman signed the first foreign aid bill in April 1948, he said: “This is the answer to the challenge facing the free world.”
After 29 years of foreign aid, the Communist challenge facing the free world is far greater than ever before. The Communists have consolidated and made permanent their control of Eastern Europe and China, and extended their control over Southeast Asia, Cuba, and, most recently, Angola and Mozambique in Africa. Foreign aid is now extended even to Communist countries.
There is no evidence that foreign giveaways ever bought us any friends. Many of the big recipients of American grants consistently vote against us in the United Nations.
There is considerable doubt that U.S. foreign aid is of any real long-term benefit to underdeveloped countries, anyway. Foreign aid often goes into the hands of the minority political clique that happens to be in control, it encourages the establishment of uneconomic industries that can’t be sustained without subsidies, and it encourages reliance on external help instead of self-improvement. Hong Kong is an example of how a poor country can pull itself up by its own bootstraps by hard work and ambition.
Foreign giveaways are the biggest ripoff of the American worker that the liberals ever devised. We pay first in direct taxes, second in the inflation caused by the deficit spending required to make the payments, third in high interest costs because most foreign aid is borrowed money, and fourth in the loss of jobs from the drain of capital investment.
Every poll taken in the United States shows that foreign aid is the least popular of all Federal spending programs. There is no demand from the voters to continue these annual giveaways. Yet, if there are three certainties in this unéertain world, they are death, taxes, and foreign aid. Congress just passed another annual foreign aid bill of $5 billion, and even that figure does not include the billions more hidden under other headings.
The only excuse for Walter Mondale’s ill-advised speech urging more foreign aid is that he didn’t write it himself, He was reading a speech written for him by Jimmy Carter’s Georgia braintrust. The best thing Senator Mondale can do is to disavow it.
