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Why America must end the foreign aid racket

Illustration on foreign aid by Alexander Hunter/The Washington Times more >

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By Stephen Moore - -

Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire seethed the edict puts “ideology over women and health.” She favors a policy that requires Americans to fund activities that they find morally offensive. So much for “pro-choice.” If Planned Parenthood wants to fund organization that fund abortions abroad, their donors should put up the money, not unwilling taxpayers.
It is also hypocritical in the extreme that groups like National Abortion Rights Action League and Planned Parenthood favor funding entities like the United Nations Family Planning agency. This is the U.N. entity that for years supported infanticide, forced abortions, sterilization and other ghastly anti-women policies in nations from China to India to many African nations in order to reduce population growth. The U.N. “family planning” office praised China’simmoral one-child per couple policy as “effective.” Yes, and Pol Pot was effective at holding down population growth as well.



This is a great start, but Mr. Trump should take a much bolder step. Stop all non-emergency foreign aid now. Every poll of the last two decades shows that voters hate foreign aid and for good reason. The programs don’t work to bring development to Nigeria or Mexico City anymore than domestic aid programs have revived inner-city Detroit or Milwaukee.
Why are American taxpayers funding birth control or for that matter any overseas family planning programs in foreign countries at all? We can’t even afford our own government health programs, and we are supposed to fund condom distribution programs in Asia and Africa? This one program alone spends over $500 million a year.
Foreign aid, when including military aid, costs at least $100 billion a year. Liberals say this is a trivial amount given that the entire federal budget exceeds $4 trillion. How is $1 trillion over a decade trivial?
One of the world’s experts on foreign aid is William Easterly, an economist at New York University. He has noted that the developed countries could save as many as 5 million deaths from malaria and other preventable infectious diseases at a cost of less than $5 per life saved. This would simply require bed netting and cheap medicines. But it doesn’t happen.