![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Jul. 15th, 2004 02:42 pm
Brother, can you spare 10 billion?
I can't remember how it came up the other night, but ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
monshu and I were talking about the comparatively small amount that the USA spends on foreign aid. We didn't know how little, though, so I thought I'd do some armchair research. As a percentage of GNP (I haven't been able to find GDP figures), it's the lowest in the OECD, but we're just so goddamn big that we end up spending almost as much as the second- and third-most generous countries (in overall amount) combined. [BTW, any guesses who they are?]
At the time, I pointed out that if we consider diplomacy war by other means, then we don't spend proportionally less than others, we just devote more to outright military expenditures. (A lot more, since much of our so-called "aid" is actually military.) The proportionately far more generous Scandinavians have to spend far less on defence (hmm...wonder why that would be), so I don't find it particularly surprising that they're able to find more funds for foreign aid.
But the most interesting thing I stumbled upon were statistics in this handsome little article stating that American private donors outspend the official budget by two to three times! This is especially positive, IMHO, because you know that far less of that money goes to fighter jets for Israel and far more to care for poor people with HIV or immunisation programmes for children.
This reminds me of a debate some years ago where various people were criticising Bush for politically-motivated aid decisions, such as his fatuous decision to shift money away from free condom distribution and toward abstinence programmes.lhn pointed out that, since Bush had cut taxes, all these people were free to take the income saved and donate it to worthy causes they could wholeheartedly support. What better way to ensure your money does what you want it to than to spend it yourself instead of letting some civil servant do it? I can't remember what the response to this was, but it was less than positive.
I wonder why. Centralising foreign aid spending by funnelling through the federal government strikes me as something that works best when you have a societal consensus on what that money should be used for. Actually, this goes for domestic aid as well. Social welfare states like France strike me as much more homogenous than the USA in mindset when it comes to the goals and effects of social spending. Here, where the gulf between progressives and conservatives is large and politics so polarised, devolving most of the decisions to the individual taxpayer strikes me as the best solution.
monshu and I were talking about the comparatively small amount that the USA spends on foreign aid. We didn't know how little, though, so I thought I'd do some armchair research. As a percentage of GNP (I haven't been able to find GDP figures), it's the lowest in the OECD, but we're just so goddamn big that we end up spending almost as much as the second- and third-most generous countries (in overall amount) combined. [BTW, any guesses who they are?]At the time, I pointed out that if we consider diplomacy war by other means, then we don't spend proportionally less than others, we just devote more to outright military expenditures. (A lot more, since much of our so-called "aid" is actually military.) The proportionately far more generous Scandinavians have to spend far less on defence (hmm...wonder why that would be), so I don't find it particularly surprising that they're able to find more funds for foreign aid.
But the most interesting thing I stumbled upon were statistics in this handsome little article stating that American private donors outspend the official budget by two to three times! This is especially positive, IMHO, because you know that far less of that money goes to fighter jets for Israel and far more to care for poor people with HIV or immunisation programmes for children.
This reminds me of a debate some years ago where various people were criticising Bush for politically-motivated aid decisions, such as his fatuous decision to shift money away from free condom distribution and toward abstinence programmes.
lhn pointed out that, since Bush had cut taxes, all these people were free to take the income saved and donate it to worthy causes they could wholeheartedly support. What better way to ensure your money does what you want it to than to spend it yourself instead of letting some civil servant do it? I can't remember what the response to this was, but it was less than positive.I wonder why. Centralising foreign aid spending by funnelling through the federal government strikes me as something that works best when you have a societal consensus on what that money should be used for. Actually, this goes for domestic aid as well. Social welfare states like France strike me as much more homogenous than the USA in mindset when it comes to the goals and effects of social spending. Here, where the gulf between progressives and conservatives is large and politics so polarised, devolving most of the decisions to the individual taxpayer strikes me as the best solution.