Sunday, December 05, 2010

Why Bruce Bartlett is hopeless

I'm not sure what to make of this post from Bruce Bartlett, called "Why fixing the budget is hopeless"

He cites a survey where 848 Americans think 25% of the Federal budget is spent on foreign aid and 10% is given as the ideal amount.

He then points out that official bilateral foreign aid in 2009 was less than 1% of the Federal budget.

First, taking everything at face value, I am not sure why this means fixing the budget is hopeless.

Second, there is a hell of a lot more to foreign aid that "bilateral foreign aid". There's US contributions to multilateral aid agencies, then there's NATO, there's our military presence in Japan, South Korea, etc., there's whatever the heck we're still doing in Iraq after a second president has said "mission accomplished". I'm not saying it's 25%, but it's way way way more than 0.6%.

Why take a question where the definition of aid is not given and could easily be construed broadly and match the answer to a very distinct, narrow definition of aid?

Unless of course, you're hopeless!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

First, taking everything at face value, I am not sure why this means fixing the budget is hopeless.

It probably has something to do with the fact that pretty much the only thing a majority people consistently say they want cut from the budget is foreign aid, which is barely more than a rounding error in the government's books. It's rearranging the Titanic's deck chairs.

Anonymous said...

"Second, there is a hell of a lot more to foreign aid that "bilateral foreign aid". There's US contributions to multilateral aid agencies, then there's NATO, there's our military presence in Japan, South Korea, etc., there's whatever the heck we're still doing in Iraq after a second president has said "mission accomplished". I'm not saying it's 25%, but it's way way way more than 0.6%."

I think your post demonstrate his point pretty well. You put multilateral aid, which is only 25% of the amount of bilateral aid (>0.2%), on the top of your list and add in stuff like military bases abroad (hint: ask the Japanese about Okinawa) and the war in Iraq (the hobby horse of a few conservative politicians). The point is that you don't know anything about the budget or foreign aid and you don't care to get your facts straight. “Stupid ferriners” does *not* amount to a political opinion.