Do you think that the global poverty act would be good for our country?

Question

Do you think that the global poverty act would be good for our country?

Answer 1

I'm a master's level social worker, and I like Obama a lot more than McCain (although I'm voting for neither) so you'd think my answer would be yes.  But the answer is no.  It would not.

Unless the global poverty act focused entirely on education, it won't make much of a difference and would just be another waste of government revenues.

Answer 2

What is a masters level social worker? And no i don't think it's americas duty to go to war on poverty.

Answer 3

Yes.

Extreme global poverty causes the instability that allows for those crazy regimes and Communists to come to power.  If after the Russian invasion in Afghanistan we had spent the millions necessary to build roads and schools we wouldn't have allowed every crazy to take root there and thus quite possibly have save the billions we spend now on Homeland Security.

Answer 4

It depends.

This act just allocates $1M/yr. for planning to be devised to reduce extreme poverty (by 'extreme' is meant, surviving on the equivalent of <$1/day; that's the lowest 700M in the world; such people don't even exist in the U.S., not even among the homeless, who have access to roads, shelter, potable water, more health service than those 700M, 12 years of free education, sectarian handouts, welfare, panhandling, scavenging, etc.).

So it's not a lot of funding, so it could go nowhere.  Or it could go somewhere.

Further weighing on the former conclusion, the cynical view is that Obama presented this legislation just so he could get his name attached to goals of halving extreme poverty by 2015, which we're on target to do anyway, even with how inefficient foreign development aid is.  This way, toward the end of his second term, he could point to his early involvement, thus boosting his and his party's cache -- without hardly asking for a dime from U.S. citizens.

Peculiarly, the baseline for the goal of cutting the number in extreme poverty in half is not even in this century.  It's 1990, as stated in the GPA.  That makes us on course for achieving the goal already.  This only lends to the idea that the act is just political fluff.

But suppose it's not, and there's genuine intent to follow through.  

Now there's a lot of inefficiency in the use of the $16B/yr the U.S. doles out in foreign development aid.  So increasing planning may be a good thing, both for the US taxpayer, who is drawn into a cycle of aid-in-perpetuity, and for the poorest billion in the world.

A galling example of such inefficiency is that, instead of focusing on improving food production among the farmers in developing countries, we wait until there's a crisis, then give them free food.  But we make sure the money returns to our economy, b/c we force countries to use the food credits to buy our food.  So in effect both food consumers (that sounds wrong, but I'm trying to distinguish from farmers in developing countries, who get screwed b/c of this subsidy) in developing countries, and U.S. farmers get handouts through this program.

What's worse, due to rising transportation and business costs, the amount of actual food delivered by U.S. aid programs has declined by more than 50% over the past five years.  Again, the solution is to focus on food production where the starvation is actually occurring.  This would free up U.S. taxpayer dollars from programs that are effectively spreading the welfare mentality to other countries and to our own farm industry.

This year the U.S. will give more than $800 million to Ethiopia: $460 million for food, $350 million for HIV/AIDS treatment — and just $7 million for agricultural development. Western governments are loath to halt programs that create a market for their farm surpluses, but for countries receiving their charity, long-term food aid can become addictive. Why bother with development when shortfalls are met by aid? Ethiopian farmers can't compete with free food, so they stop trying. Over time, there's a loss of key skills, and a country that doesn't have to feed itself soon becomes a country that can't.  The focus needs to be on the underlying problem: food production.  The band-aid is just making matters worse.

Such subsidies are no way to kick them out of the poverty trap and get them onto the first wrung of economic progress, so we can finally break free of being their caretakers.  The current crisis-intervention approach, expensive as it is, needs replacement with a longer-term, cheaper pre-crisis, preventive approach, but that entails commitment, which the U.S. is unlikely to muster.  The planning that the Global Poverty Act would budget for is aimed at correcting these sorts of anti-entrepreneurial misappropriations.

Another problem with foreign development aid is that so much lands in the pockets of our very own foreign aid advisors (about 1/6).  They drive around in expensive, jungle-ready SUVs, use numerous generators (any one of which could provide electricity for the children to study at night and help purify water during the day for dozens of village homes), and stay relatively separate from the villagers they're supposed to help behind a wall of well-paid security.  In short, more planning is needed so this 1/6 is not used so ineffectively.

Another source of inefficiency in getting the extreme poor out of the poverty trap is that, except for humanitarian emergencies, direct cash transfers are rarely an attractive way to deliver official development assistance (and I'm not talking about microloans here).  Cash transfers can raise the poor above desperate income levels, but are not likely to unlock the poverty trap if they merely fill a consumption gap.  To end the poverty trap, direct foreign assistance should be used for investments in infrastructure and human capital, thereby empowering the poor to be more productive on their own account, and putting the poor countries on a path of self-sustaining growth.

Another issue that the GPA might address is that everyone has their own pet project for how to spend foreign aid.  Some say it's all about AIDS treatment.  Some say it's all about food.  Some say it's all about education (I think someone here posted this to your answer!)  Some say it's fighting illiteracy among girls.  Some say it's all about directing funds directly to the villages, bypassing governments that can siphon off funds. Some say it's giving farmers drought-resistant seeds and irrigation methods.  Some says the problem is overpopulation, and BC is needed.  The trouble is that any of these alone won't kick a village out of a poverty trap.  It's important to broaden one's way of viewing the economics at play.  There is no magic bullet.  Even worse, you can't expect results by using one pet project in one village, another project in another, and so on.  This is just spreading the money so thin that we'll be perpetually giving money to these people.

What's needed is to apply numerous solutions from above, while implementing rigorous standards for giving aid to governments: the government must demonstrate sufficient planning for the funding it will receive (I'm making a distinction here from the funds and farming equipment directly sent to the villages) to qualify for the infrastructure funding.  To understand this better, the standards in mind (I'm talking about the standards mapped out not in the GPA but in the UN Millennium Project that many associate the GPA with) can be compared to the standards Iran is being held to: What? No plans drawn up for nuclear plant design? What? No economic analysis countering the widely held view that your huge natural gas reserves provide a far more economical energy policy than nuclear energy?  Then we don't believe your enrichment program is peaceful and won't lift sanctions.

To explain the need for involving developing governments at all (I know, it's tempting to just leave them out entirely and go directly to the villages) is that infrastructure, that thing we've ignored in our own country for the past half century, would greatly improve many things in their country (yeah, far more than it would in our own, since they're so far behind).  For example, repairing an existing road, half of which is impassible, doesn't double trade.  It increases it far more b/c the number of pairs of villages in contact shoots up much higher than a factor of two.  Also opening markets allows one to specialize one's farming, switching from food you grow just for yourself to growing more profitable crop, that can be traded for cash for expanding future business.  Roads also help knock down language barriers (have you seen how many flippin' languages each African country has?!), and reduce tribalism.  Also, roads between countries should be coordinated, to improve exports and cut down on the high transportation costs that being landlocked causes.  (SE Asia is hardly landlocked, making advancement much easier than for Sub-Saharan Africa or Bolivia, the latter which lost its coast line in wartime to Chile in the early 1800s.)

So the GPA planning could be good, but if it doesn't lead to real changes in efficiency, then it may be a century or more before we have a significant middle class market to sell our exports to in the countries harboring the bottom billion poorest.  Furthermore, ending this aid-in-perpetuity nonsense would be a good thing in the long run the U.S. taxpayer.

Answer 5

We're the richest nation on earth...how would we have the means to end poverty?

Answer 6

Since we would pay for 80+% of it like other global programs -UN c**p-

and have no input it would acheive nothing.

NAFTA has done more to end global poverty than any other program and we're paying for that to in many ways.

Let's redistribute wealth-you ready to live on $6200/ year or are we gonna print more money

Answer 7

It would be better than the Global War policy of the republicans.

Answer 8

you mean using the police powers of government to rob us of our hard earned money don't you? I would rather burn all my money then allow it to be taken from me to be given to another country. Why is it our responsibility to "bail out" others?