<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by dlm:
Actually I was not referring to the "least developed countries". Instead I was referring to more "developed" countries like Russia, Isreal, France, Japan, Egypt as well as others... According to your quote USA's current foreign aid is $13,000,000,000. A 50% reduction ($6.5 Billion) would more than pay for the needed equipment and security that is being discussed here. My question to you is what is more important, propping up or subsidizing some foreign government or have state of the art safety and security here in the USA?</font>
It's really not that simple. The foreign aid we give is used as a tool to advance our foreign policy objectives (whether this is itself morally problematic is another issue altogether). There is no question that we should "prop up" a friendly foreign government if the alternative is to have them replaced with Talibanesque regimes. Unfortunately, certain short-sighted US Administrations (not to name names) have been using our foreign aid to prop up Talibanesque regimes to the detriment of more democratic governments, but again, that's another issue.
And in any case, out of all 22 OECD industrialized nations in the world, we provide the least amount of foreign aid as a percentage of GDP. Even Greece and Portugal spend more than we do.
We have plenty of money spent on far less worthy causes. How about the latest $100 billion corporate welfare dole-out passed by the House that even Paul O'Neill called a "show business" pander to campaign contributors?
[This message has been edited by robinhood (edited 11-10-2001).]