Obama Laments Debt, But Promises Billions for Anti-Poverty Program
by FOXNews.com
Friday, September 19, 2008
By Bill Sammon
Barack Obama, who lamented Friday that “we have not managed our federal budget with any kind of discipline,” is nonetheless promising to spend $50 billion on a United Nations anti-poverty program that critics say will drive up American debt.
“The short-term weakness in the capital market is a reflection of long-term problems that we have in our economy,” Obama told reporters in Florida. “We have been loading up enormous amounts of debt.”
Yet Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden, have pledged tens of billions in new spending on a U.N. program that promises cash to poor countries. The program is one of eight sweeping “Millennium Development Goals” the U.N. adopted in 2000.
“Obama and Biden will embrace the Millennium Development Goal of cutting extreme poverty around the world in half by 2015, and they will double our foreign assistance to $50 billion to achieve that goal,” the candidates vow in their campaign platform.
Johns Hopkins professor Steve Hanke said such spending would merely drive up American debt, while doing almost nothing for the world’s poor.
“It goes down a bureaucratic rat-hole, lining the pockets of people who are connected to the power structure,” said Hanke, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. “It’s basically a system to redistribute income from middle class people in the United States to rich people in poor countries. It never reaches those people who are living on a dollar a day.”
Hanke said such expenditures are especially unwise in the wake of significant expansions of government and spending during President Bush’s tenure.
“We’ve been spending like drunken sailors and making obligations into the future like drunken sailors,” he said. “We’re on an unsustainable path in terms of the fiscal situation in the United States because of massive spending growth and commitments.”
Obama said he wants to curtain at least one of those costly commitments.
“We have spent well over half a trillion dollars — soon to be a trillion dollars — on a war in Iraq, despite the fact that Iraqis are now running surpluses,” the Illinois senator said Friday. “We’re still spending $10 billion a month there.”
But in December, Obama also sponsored the Global Poverty Act which, if passed, would require the president to commit to cutting global poverty in half by 2015. Critics say that would cost American taxpayers $845 billion.
Susan Rice, one of Obama’s top foreign policy advisers, says the U.S. should give 0.7 percent of its Gross Domestic Product to developing nations.
Bill Sammon is Washington deputy managing editor for FOX News Channel.
If one wants to know about the New World Order and what is its goals, just read the above and see what the libs want to do with our hard earned capitalistic money. Support social, economic, and backward communal nations. Obama would rather use the money spent on the Iraqi war for social and world anti poverty goals in other nations than support his own with less taxes and increased productivity by labor and commerce. Does anyone with a brain think that any money not spent on the Iraqi war, will be used in this country to reduce our dependency on oil or reduce the government deficit, decrease government welfare programs, or build our economy based on small business capitalistic priniciples and yet increase further taxation, if this man becomes President? This concept was a UN resolution to reduce poverty world wide in half by 2012. Do we do the same for Zimbabwe, with anti American policies, murder, and highest inflation rate of any country, anywhere in the world, when it once was the bread basket of Africa? Who do you think is going to get the money? The people who need it? I got a bridge to no where to sell you, if you do.
