[Thermodyne]

Originally posted by primitive:
Urban myths:
US foreign aid financing the 3rd world, is one of the premium urban myths of our times.
While the actual value in USD is great, large parts of it can hardly be described as aid. Also per capita value is less then for most other rich/western countries.
Here you can get a breakdown:

http://www.peacehost.net/mdpc/USAIDvsPoverty.html

I know many of you will claim this link is biased, and you are probably right. But it is still much closer to the truth than what some of you obviously believe.

(Guess my cred is gone forever now, since I promised not to post in this thread again )

Which parts of it are not aid? If you are a country like Israel and have several countries that would like to see you dead, isn’t military aid just as valuable as humanitarian aid? Also the numbers reflect the budgeted amounts; a lot of America’s humanitarian aid is not budgeted, being delivered as needed to meet circumstances. And a lot of economic aid is distributed through the World Bank; I didn’t see any figures for contributions and guarantees for that. Also the payments to the UN are missing as are the numbers for the donations from the private sector. Statistics can be use to make a case for either side, and should only be used for comparison purposes. I doubt the authors would have been able to make their case if they had used the complete numbers and also listed the top 20 countries besides the US. America has great wealth, but this does no entitle the rest of the world to a share of it. We work hard here to generate it, harder that a lot of you know. And in times like these, the money could be put to good use here at home. All but one European nation never repaid money owed to the US from WWII. We forgave these debts. We also did not share in the reparations after WWI. When it comes to charity, I think the US does its share.

Also since it was on the seven o’clock news Last night, I guess it is Ok to say that the air war started 8 weeks ago. We have been aggressively taking down Iraq’s air defense systems in the south at the rate of 100 sorties a week. And the rules of engagement are scheduled to change from FWFO to FOW this weekend. In the Last 10 days over 300 sorties were flown.

[ February 27, 2003, 12:52: Message edited by: Thermodyne ]