Friday, September 26, 2008

OBAMA TOUTS $845 BILLION DOLLAR BAILOUT PLAN: FOR OTHER COUNTRIES

This is nothing short of astounding. Audacity? Oh, he has audacity. This was yesterday. YESTERDAY!!! We're losing our shirt, McCain is pitching resolutions to solve OUR problems, and Obama comes up with this? THIS??? He fancies himself a "citizen of the world". Me? I'm just a citizen of America.

[While the financial bailout is estimated to cost Americans $2300 apiece, Barack Obama was in Florida, touting his Global Poverty Act, which would cost every American man, woman and child an additional $2450 each.]

At a time when Americans are faced with perhaps the most dire financial crisis facing the country in decades, it’s a tale of two vastly different priorities: Senator Barack Obama gave a speech today in Clearwater, Florida, outlining his goals if elected President: two of which where global, met by 2015, and paid for by American taxpayers to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, while Senator McCain was in Washington working with the Congress on solving the financial crisis.

This isn’t some “nebulous” plan dreamed up by Obama, it’s an actual bill, the Global Poverty Act, (S2433), written and sponsored by the Senator from Illinois. In February, Senator Biden, Obama’s running mate, rushed the bill through his Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The bill was then recommended to be put before the Senate. On April 24 the bill was placed on Senate Legislatived Calender.

“The legislation would commit the U.S. to spending 0.7 percent of gross national product on foreign aid, which amounts to a phenomenal 13-year total of $845 billion over and above what the U.S. already spends.”

As American taxpayers well know, foreign aid has been part and parcel of United States largess for decades. Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson addresses the difference between foreign aid and foreign investment in regards to the Obama bill:

“Nowhere in the world can we point to a country that has escaped poverty through foreign aid—in spite of more than $2 trillion of foreign aid spending so far. Tragically, in some African countries that have received billions of dollars in aid, standards of living have deteriorated rather than improved in recent decades. As celebrity economist Jeffrey Sachs has written, the majority of foreign aid gets siphoned off to service old debts, pay for expensive consultants, fund emergency humanitarian relief, or to Swiss bank accounts. Of the remaining “aid,” much often goes to U.S. multinational corporations (corporate welfare?) who are contracted to construct dams, airports, highways, buildings, etc. Many of those projects are no more than “white elephants”—extravagant monuments to vain leaders that do little to foster economic development.”

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