The big-spending liberals are sounding off with their annual regrets about the defects of foreign aid. So what else is new! They will end up voting for it, as they always do.
Hubert Humphrey calls foreign aid “an administrative nightmare.” President Carter refers to its “mismanagement and inefficiency.” Foreign aid boss John J. Gilligan, former Governor of Ohio, says mea culpa, mea culpa, we have “more chiefs than braves” in the agency.
Nobody enthusiastically defends foreign aid any more, but it is still holding steady at its annual level of $6 billion. Despite all the regrets, you can bet it will be approved again this year.
The U.S. foreign giveaway program since World War II has cost the American taxpayers well over $200 billion, which is almost half the public debt. This is the equivalent of the assessed valuation of all U.S. cities with a population of 100,000 or more. The United States has given foreign aid to 121 of the 130 nations in the world and to 99 percent of the world’s population.
Foreign aid, including interest on the money the Federal Government borrows to give away, is a major cause of the high taxes we pay. Foreign aid is also a major cause of high prices because it annually takes billions of dollars worth of goods out of the U.S. economy without a corresponding reduction in local purchasing power.
Foreign aid has wiped out thousands of American jobs. For 30 years, various foreign aid agencies and programs have given foreign countries our most modern machinery and equipment, and foreign aid dollars have brought foreign technicians to America to study and take home our latest technology.
With low cost foreign labor, with taxes only a small fraction of ours, and with ultra-modern U.S. machinery and technology provided free by the United States, foreign industry has been able to undersell much of our domestic production.
Why does America continue, year after year, to dole out our hard-earned American dollars when we need this money so badly at home for so many projects and to give relief to our hard-pressed taxpayers?
We are told that foreign aid is designed for our own security. Yet, America is far less secure today than before foreign aid began. We used to be told that the objective of foreign aid was to stop Communist aggression. That isn’t a very persuasive argument since five new countries have fallen to Communism in the last several years. Many billions of our foreign giveaways even have gone directly to the Soviet Union and other Communist governments.
For 30 years, U.S. foreign aid has been generously dispensed to friend and foe, to good credit risks and to deadbeats, to governments that are polite to us and to governments that insult us and vote against us in the UN.
Now North Vietnam is demanding more than $2 billion in foreign aid supposedly promised by President Nixon. With our foreign handout record, it is no wonder that North Vietnam is optimistic about climbing aboard the gravy train, too.
Although nearly every other Communist country in the world has, at some time, received American aid, Congress should decisively reject aid to North Vietnam which still refuses to account for our servicemen missing in action.
