Global Poverty Act

8 Comments Posted on Democrats, Liberals

re: remove all doubt

Interesting that my buddy Chris is willing to link to Fox News, since it’s such an unreliable source. 😉 I’m not sure why he wants to classify Fox News as part of the MSM, except that a lot more people watch FNC for their news than MSLSD or CNN.  But ok…Fox News is now part of the hypocritical double standard where the MSM doesn’t call Iraq and Afghanistan socialistic enterprises, but it criticizes Obama for wanting to spend US taxpayer dollars on solving global poverty.  One of these should be under the umbrella of necessary foreign policy, and one of them should not be.  We disagree on whether the US role in rebuilding Iraq is a good investment in a positive outcome for Iraq or whether it’s just government wasting our money on useless nation-building — and thus no more useful than Obama’s efforts to finance the end of world poverty.

I’m not missing any such point.  If the MSM sees a difference between our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan and what Obama is proposing with the Global Poverty Act,  it’s probably because there is one.  If your intention is to shoot a specific messenger, you might want to get a more accurate gun.  If Barack is being misrepresented, that’s not my fault.  That’s not the fault of the MSM or Fox News.  That’s his campaign’s fault.  But I’m getting off of the subject here…

I called the bailouts socialism, while acknowledging my lack of expertise on the subject of the financial markets.  You can choose to see this as a cop-out, or as an excuse for me not to be too hard on President Bush.  That’s your opinion, and you are welcome to it.  You can spin all you want to, but even you do not know what Barack Obama will do once he’s President.  He could decide to keep troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Thus the war funding would continue.  

But let’s say you’re right — that we suddenly have all the Iraq and Afghanistan money to play with.

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4 Comments Posted on '08 Election, Democrats, Liberals

the ‘s’ word

Investor’s Business Daily is brave enough to go there — calling Barack Obama’s Global Poverty Act suspiciously similar to a government redistribution of US taxpayer wealth.  Well, technically they use the ‘s’ word.  Socialism. That’s a heavy charge, and it’s one that needs to be backed up with specific examples.  This op-ed makes a convincing case that the Global Poverty Act could qualify as a socialist proposal.

While I know that one example of bad policy wouldn’t brand someone like Barack with the socialist label, it’s troubling that this Global Poverty Act would redistribute our wealth to those in other countries.  We wouldn’t even benefit from all this increased spending, unless international good will can be bought with this high price.  That premise is highly questionable.  If the world’s affection can be bought with enough foreign aid money, we should have the receipt for it already.

Here’s how Investor’s Business Daily first described this bill:

Obama’s costly, dangerous and altogether bad bill (S. 2433), which could come up in the Senate any day, is called the Global Poverty Act. It would commit U.S. taxpayers to spend 0.7% of our gross domestic product on foreign handouts, which is at least $30 billion over and above the exorbitant and wasted sums we already give away overseas.

The bipartisan bill would require the president “to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the U.S. foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day.”

To say that the United States government has far exceeded its Consititutional mandate would be understating the case.  Charity shouldn’t (and doesn’t) begin and end with the federal government.  Americans are generous people.  Through non-profit charitable organizations and our own churches, we are reaching out to people here in this country and around the world, and it’s having an impact.  This shouldn’t be a role of the federal government.  That’s the flaw in this legislation — requiring United States taxpayers to subsidize some mandate thrown down by the U.N. and the international community.  The financial obligation of the federal government should be first and foremost to the citizens of the United States — not to the world community or the U.N.

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