By DOUG BANDOW
SEATTLE — The United States will run up a record $1.65 trillion deficit in 2011. Yet Washington keeps subsidizing foreign governments. House Republicans have targeted foreign aid. This year the State Department would lose 16 percent of its budget; humanitarian aid would drop by 41 percent.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warns of catastrophe: "Cuts of this magnitude will be devastating to our national security, will render us unable to respond to unanticipated disasters and will damage our leadership around the world." Moreover, the proposed reductions will be "detrimental to America's security."
Even some conservatives stand with Clinton on this issue. For instance, Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post's in-house blogger on the right, termed Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, a "neo-isolationist" for proposing to cut what amounts to international welfare.
Despite Clinton's extravagant claims, there is little evidence that foreign assistance advances U.S. interests. The U.S. provided some $30 billion to Egypt over the last three decades, but the country remains poor and undemocratic. Indeed, aid to the corrupt Mubarak dictatorship helped turn Egypt into popular volcano.
Pakistan has been on the U.S. dole and performing disastrously for decades. The waste, inefficiency and corruption surrounding humanitarian projects in Afghanistan and Iraq are legendary. What of the $27 billion in so-called development assistance requested for next year? These outlays have had no discernible impact on Third World economic growth.
No doubt some projects in some countries have provided some benefits. But there is no correlation between aid and growth. Indeed, generous financial transfers to corrupt dictators often have impeded necessary reforms.
Aid advocates now claim to do better. President George W. Bush created the Millennium Challenge Corporation to reward governments with good policies. Yet, reported the Washington Times last August, the agency "is giving billions of dollars to nations upbraided by the State Department for corruption in government."
The World Bank also has emphasized better governance. However, reported Tom Porteous, the London director of Human Rights Watch, "multibillion dollar programs funded by the World Bank and others have been politicized and manipulated by the Ethiopian government and are used as a powerful tool of political control and repression." Aid incentives are all wrong.
The international dole has created long-term dependency and discouraged reform. Even humanitarian aid has a disappointing record. Six months after the earthquake in Haiti, reported the Wall Street Journal, "the process of reconstruction appears to have come to a halt." U.S. "Food for Peace" shipments, used to dump farmers' domestic surpluses, are notorious for ruining local farmers and thus undermining local production. This problem continues in Haiti.
