Counting on foreign aid to reduce corruption is like expecting whiskey to cure alcoholism. After closed House of Representatives impeachment hearings heard testimony on President Trump’s role in delaying U.S. aid to Ukraine, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer declared:
“Numbers don’t lie. It’s even more clear now that President Trump is not the anti-corruption crusader he claims to be.”Most of the press coverage has tacitly assumed that American assistance is vital to fighting corruption in Ukraine. But that ignores foreign aid’s toxic record and Ukraine’s post-Soviet history.
A 2002 American Economic Review analysis concluded that “increases in [foreign] aid are associated with contemporaneous increases in corruption,” and that “corruption is positively correlated with aid received from the United States.”
That was the year President George W. Bush launched a new foreign aid program, the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA). Bush declared, “I think it makes no sense to give aid, money, to countries that are corrupt.” But the Bush administration continued delivering billions of dollars in handouts to many of the world’s most corrupt regimes. By 2004, the State Department had codified what amounted to backtracking: “The MCA is an incentive-based supplement to other U.S. aid programs.” The Bush team found excuses to give MCA aid to some of the world’s most corrupt governments as well, including Georgia.
More
I have always said Foreign aid is not used as designed to help people but to create millionaires / billionaires of the ones that were responsible for the proper designation of the money. Stop all foreign aid until there is a strict requirement and oversight of the usage of the money.
ReplyDeleteJust ask the Clinton and Bush families.
ReplyDeletePretty sure that is the whole purpose of "foreign aid".
ReplyDeleteI mean, I was born at night just not last night.
This is written by a Democrat propagandist. The narrative is a lie and It states facts that are not true thereby planting these assumptions in people’s heads as a secondary item. The aid was never withheld nor delayed. This is Soviet in design people. These are the tactics of our enemies and it’s Democrats doing it.
ReplyDeleteJust saying.