http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/03/06/should-us-make-huge-foreign-aid-payments/
The Obama administration gave $250 million to Egypt, and has received criticism for this because of the cutbacks in other parts of the budget. One cutback that especially received criticism was the release of "low-priority" illegal immigrants from jail. However, Secretary of State John Kerry described Egypt as an extreme need. Should the United States drastically cut foreign aid because of the cuts in our budget? And if foreign aid is reduced, what is the most important criteria to determine what countries receive aid?
The Obama administration gave $250 million to Egypt, and has received criticism for this because of the cutbacks in other parts of the budget. One cutback that especially received criticism was the release of "low-priority" illegal immigrants from jail. However, Secretary of State John Kerry described Egypt as an extreme need. Should the United States drastically cut foreign aid because of the cuts in our budget? And if foreign aid is reduced, what is the most important criteria to determine what countries receive aid?
3 comments:
Tough question and there are probably no right answers as the questions are more moral inquiries than quantitative ones. One could take the view that if we do not resolve our debt issues we may reach a point were we may need help ourselves and thus based on this logic we should look inward first. However, my personal believe is that it makes more strategic sense to help out Egypt as we need more allies in the middle east and if we can influence them to establish ideals like ours then we should absolutely take advantage of that opportunity.
I have an idea, we could cut back the 60 billion dollar "black budget" that no one knows about and that is used for super sketchy government endeavors. Then we wouldn't have to worry about this quite as much.
But seriously, this is a tough question and I couldn't agree more with what Vinny said. There will always be critics and skeptics. In the current state of global affairs (North Korea... China's possible impending recession, Europe..) allies are probably a better thing to have, than a little less debt.
It depends on how the foreign aid is used. It's been demonstrated time and time again that pumping money into corrupt or unstable governments generally does very little to improve the quality of life or services within the nation since the money seems to enter a black hole as soon as it comes in.
Post a Comment