Has Obama Ever Heard of Killing the Golden Goose?
Don't miss Phyllis Schlafly's latest column about a very bad bill introduced by Barack Obama, the Global Poverty Act (S. 2433): Congress Contemplates Giving Cash to Foreigners. An excerpt from Schlafly's column is below. But first, my reaction.
Eliminating global poverty is a noble goal, but the way to do that is not to hand cash to social planners and dictators around the world who have run their nations' economies into the ground. America's strength is in its living free markets, not in some lifeless pile of money.
For people who don't understand the source of wealth, it seems very logical to correct poverty by taking money from one group or nation and handing it to another. The problem is that if you do that often enough you run both nations into the ground. You squelch incentives in the "donor" nation and in the "recipient" nation as well. Besides, poverty is a moving target. You will never eliminate poverty because there will always be some who have more and some who have less.
American taxpayers are already providing free health care, schools, cash and social services to every immigrant who finds his way across a border, legally or illegally. The strain on America's taxpayers, schools, hospitals and prisons is already great.
Now Americans are supposed to support all 6.6 billion people on earth? The United States is reasonably wealthy, but not that wealthy. You can only pluck so many feathers from the golden goose before it dies.
Schlafly writes:
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 percent 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 United States 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."
The bill's other co-sponsors include Sens. Joseph Biden, D-Del., Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., Chris Dodd, D-Conn., Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Russ Feingold, D-Wis., Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., Charles Hagel, R-Neb., and Robert Mendez, D-N.J.
We should be on guard any time politicians use the word "comprehensive," an umbrella word that always shades a lot of mischief. The notion that U.S. taxpayers should or could cut in half the number of people worldwide who live in poverty by 2015 is ridiculous.
The scariest phrase in the bill is "Millennium Development Goal." That refers to the declaration adopted by the United Nations Millennium Assembly and Summit in 2000 (blessed by President Bill Clinton) which called for the "eradication of poverty" by "redistribution (of) wealth and land," cancellation of "the debts of developing countries," and "a fair distribution of the earth's resources" (from the United States to the rest of the world, of course).
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