Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Too Much Red Wine: Answer 2

Second Section of My Response to Friend's Question (see below for answer 1):

Answer 2:

Toward the end of the article [http://www.cafonline.org/Default.aspx?page=12183] the authors did address the fact that many of the more highly taxed nations—the one’s I am suggesting provide a larger percentage of their GDP through governmental budget to foreign aid—made smaller personal donations to charitable causes and that this is likely related to the fact that they already pay taxes that they believe make up the difference in their personal charitable acts; perhaps its six one way and a half a dozen the other. Maybe if you add it all up the personal contributions of lower taxed countries make up the difference or even surpass the amounts that foreign governments are contributing to fight hunger, AIDS, lack of education and infrastructure, etc. I’m not sure and I will make an effort to find out. I still stand by my statement last night that the United States government gives the least percentage of our GDP in foreign aid compared to the other industrialized nations.

I will highlight a few points from an article, "Debunking Myths About Foreign Aid" (2001) (http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2093), I found a few months ago.

Over most of the past 50 years, the U.S. took the lead in advancing foreign aid for developing countries. Foreign-aid priorities were driven by the cold war, and the U.S. saw fighting hunger and poverty as a way to slow communism and woo Third World governments. For example, the biggest recipients of U.S. aid in Africa in the 1980s were dictatorships in Somalia, Sudan and Liberia that contributed to the violence still afflicting these countries today.
Since the end of the cold war, however, funding for aid has dropped. Without a clear statement of purpose for its post-cold-war aid program, Congress has bogged down the work of USAID, the main aid agency within the U.S. government. In the absence of a strong commitment to foreign aid, debilitating myths about such aid have become widespread. Before we sustain a commitment to reducing hunger and poverty around the world, we must debunk these myths (pp.1-2).


This begins to address my concern about only doing “generous” things for other people when you expect to get something in return. There may always be some truth to this notion, even if it is only a sense of wellbeing for doing something helpful, and perhaps it could make a big difference in the predominately poor nations where Islam is the most popular religious system. However, as an individual, or a leader of an organization or agency, and certainly as a member of God’s Kingdom I cannot find evidence for generosity that is based on return on investment. Generosity is an opportunity to share and help others with no expectation of them returning the favor, directly or indirectly.

A recent poll by the Program for International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland showed that most Americans still imagine that 20 percent of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. In reality, less than 1 percent of the budget is for foreign aid, and only about one-third of that is development assistance.
U.S. development aid has declined steadily over the past 15 years. The U.S. now ranks last among the 22 industrialized countries in percentage of national income given away in development aid: less than 0.1 percent. Tiny Denmark contributes ten times as much of its national income as American taxpayers do. Japan has been the largest provider of official development assistance for ten consecutive years (pp.2-3).


Additional information to corroborate the US government's contributions, or lack there of, to world aid and development are not hard to find. This document (http://www.globalissues.org/article/35/us-and-foreign-aid-assistance) and website seems to have some interesting data. It notes the failure of all industrialized nations to meet the goals and priorities that were set in the 1970s regarding foreign aid commitments as a percentage of, then GDP, now GNI (Gross National Income). Nonetheless, the US has ranked last, tied for last, or in second to last place out of 22 nations in percentage of GNI to foreign aid (see page 6 of the document for a graphical display).

As shown throughout this web site (and hundreds of others) one of the root causes of poverty lies in the powerful nations that have formulated most of the trade and aid policies today, which are more to do with maintaining dependency on industrialized nations, providing sources of cheap labor and cheaper goods for populations back home and increasing personal wealth, and maintaining power over others in various ways. As mentioned in the structural adjustment section, so-called lending and development schemes have done little to help poorer nations progress” (“US and Foreign Aid Assistance,” p.23).

This article, or group of articles, also attempts to analyze the combined efforts of government aid with private donations (whether through foundations, NGOs, corporations, or individuals). They, however, make a distinction between aid that is given simply for development/raising standards of living and aid that is given with strings attached for the benefit of the donor agency, nation, and/or corporation. Their criteria are:

Adjusting Aid Numbers To Factor Private Contributions and More
1. Quality of recipient governance as well as poverty;
2. Penalizing tying of aid;
3. Handling reverse flows (debt service) in a consistent way;
4. Penalizes project proliferation (overloading recipient governments with the administrative burden of many small aid projects);
5. And rewards tax policies that encourage private charitable giving to developing countries (p.12).


I’m not sure if I’ve digested all of the standards of how they make these considerations and adjustments, but overall it’s pretty disappointing. The highest “Quality-adjusted aid and charitable giving/GDP (%)” is only .5% (Sweden). The lowest is .03% (New Zealand). The US ties with Spain and Greece at .07%. These figures are pretty far off from the figures you found last night, and are likely put through a tough set of standards (1-5 above) before they are finally calculated. The point they are trying to make, and this is what is of importance to me, is that much foreign aid comes with strings attached and ultimately brings more benefit to the corporation or government that is “donating” it. In the end, and for a multitude of reasons, the countries that do receive aid may gain some benefit from it, but the article even puts forth the argument that in some cases countries that receive aid with so many strings attached end up in worse conditions than before they began receiving aid (pp. 13-15).

Recent claims of some "leading industrial nations" being "stingy" may put people on the defensive, but many nations whom we are told are amongst the world’s best, can in fact, do better. Adelman, further above noted that the US is "clearly the most generous on earth in public—but especially in private—giving", yet the CGD [Center for Global Development] suggests otherwise, saying that the US does not close the gap with most other rich countries; "The US gives 13c/day/person in government aid….American’s private giving—another 5c/day—is high by international standards but does not close the gap with most other rich countries. Norway gives $1.02/day in public aid and 24c/day in private aid" per person. (These numbers will change of course, year by year, but the point here is that Adelman’s assertion—one that many seem to have—is not quite right) (p.14).


In the end, as you noted in your email, there are statistics and talking heads who will find evidence for anything and everything that tickles a person’s fancy or scares them into taking action. I find that this article has useful information and deserves a closer look to determine its sources and purposes.


I’ve tried to consistently support my claim that US foreign aid from the government (as a percentage of GDP or GNI) is low compared to other industrialized nations. This was my claim last night and I am comfortable to stand behind it. I realize that there are multitudes of other ways to look at this. A very common one is to note that the efforts of our military to reform, restructure, rebuild, and assist other nations can be considered as a form of foreign aid. To be sure, there is no shortage of our national budget being currently routed through the DOD. I would propose that we may have gotten farther in stabilizing the international relationships over the last 50 years if we would have spent more money on truly helping people, any and all people, and not just the ones that we thought we could benefit from helping. We cannot forget the obvious missteps that our country made in the past when we enlisted, aided, supplied, and supported Saddam Hussein in Iraq because we thought he could be a moderate ally against the destabilizing situation in Iran. Similarly, we supplied many fighters in Afghanistan when it was to our advantage to use them to fight against the Russians, but once the conflict fizzled out we left the Afghani people in a war torn country with no good leadership and said, “thanks for your help, good luck”. Wouldn’t it be nice if we would have stayed in Afghanistan long enough to help them rebuild into a country that had some form of democracy and justice. What we didn’t do then we are paying for now. And it is, I think, not an overstatement to suggest that much of the radical Muslim’s hatred toward the US is based on our spotty history of treating people in the Middle East as fully human as opposed to pawns in our bigger plans. I only wonder what choices we are making now militarily that will come back to haunt us in 20-30 years.


Consider this phase one of my attempt to answer your questions. If I may, I would like to pose a few questions to you. You seem to think that regardless of whether Iraq attacked the US or any other sovereign state that the US did the right thing by changing its long-held policies of not using pre-emptive strikes/wars with other sovereign nations; and this regardless of what the UN or many other nations thought best. If I understood you correctly you believe that invading Iraq was a good thing because (a) they would have likely done something bad or harmful to the US or someone else sooner than later, and (b) there was evidence that Saddam’s regime was torturing, murdering, and otherwise mistreating certain portions of the Iraqi population. Based on these two criteria why has the US not intervened in other dictatorships where torture and death have been dealt to a nation’s people by their own leaders and military (off the top of my head I can think of Rwanda, Somalia, and the Sudan in Africa, but I’m pretty sure there are others)? Similarly, given the noted concern for tortue of Iraqi citizens, why have so many US citizens been able to comfortably accept, if not advocate for, the torture and inhumane treatment of individuals held in US military prisons around the world?

Additionally, is it ethically or morally responsible for the US to maintain ties with Saudi Arabia when it is well known that there are many things that take place in that country that violate standards of democracy, justice, freedom, rights for women and all of the other things we say we are fighting for in Iraq? Based on the two previous criteria that I listed as my understanding of why you think it was good for us to attack Iraq it seems like we have good cause to invade Saudi Arabia too. Or perhaps there is a double standard. Is it possible that we saw Iraq as a convenient target that could be strategically beneficial (oil fields in Iraq and a good central location in the Middle East to try to build a few permanent military bases) and that our attacking Iraq has much less to do with the nice packaging of freedom and democracy or the original scare tactics of WMDs and much more to do with control and access in the Middle East (which we ultimately may or may not get)?

(Citation page numbers in post were determined by converting websites to Adobe .PDF)

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