Posted on 01/13/2013 8:53:27 AM PST by Steve Peacock
Congress and the Obama administration have averted, for now, plunging the nation over the so-called “fiscal cliff” by postponing spending cuts and raising taxes on American families by $620 billion and confirming plans to try to bill taxpayers for another $1 trillion.
Now the White House is spending millions collected from those same taxpayers to avoid another “fiscal cliff” – this time in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
The payments are going to contractors who are tasked with keeping Jordan and other similarly situated nations from falling off those financial precipices.
Part of the solution rests in more privatization of government services as well as in the creation of Public-Private-Partnerships, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development.
In Jordan, for example, citizen uprisings have led the government to run a budget deficit of nearly $1.5 billion, equivalent to about 12 percent of its GDP, the agency says.
The U.S. has proposed that Jordan “merge, eliminate, or reclassify 22 autonomous public institutions” as a cost-saving measure.
The Obama administration sees itself having a stake in this reform because, as the Congressional Research Service describes that relationship, Jordan is a critical ally in light of its role in the Arab-Israeli peace process.
Additionally, its geographic position, “wedged between Israel, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, has made it vulnerable to the strategic designs of its more powerful neighbors,” CRS says in a 2012 report made public by the Federation of American Scientists, “but has also given Jordan an important role as a buffer between these potential adversaries.”
Maintaining the stability of Jordan’s monarchy, CRS says, “is a key [U.S.] policy priority, particularly as political change makes the region less predictable.”
The issuance of government debt, combined with financial help from Persian Gulf and international allies, has helped to finance the Jordanian deficit. But given the state of the global economy – compounded by rising Jordanian government borrowing costs and higher interest rates – USAID says, “there is no guarantee that additional resources will continue to flow from donors.”
There is no guarantee, that is, except from the U.S., which recently extended for another year the contract for the Jordan Fiscal Reform Project II. USAID sees FRP II as “a key part of Jordan’s economic reform efforts to address the negative impacts of the Arab Spring.”
USAID exercised the final one-year option through October 2014 with vendor DAI/Nathan Group, enabling the company to continue advising the government of Jordan. The firm in 2009 secured a five-year $38.5 million contract to implement the Government Financial Management Information System, or GFMIS, for Jordan.
USAID on Jan. 6 said, however, that the new contract extension – which raises the ceiling to $43 million – is necessary as it also expands the project’s scope of work, according to a Justification for Other Than Full and Open Competition, or JOFOC, document that U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor discovered via routine database research.
The extension comes within months of a U.S. agreement to provide an additional $360 million in assistance to Jordan. That federal infusion includes $184 million in cash devoted to relieving Jordan’s “fiscal pressures” and another $29 million “to support King Abdullah’s vision for political development,” according to an agency announcement.
The U.S. overall has reduced aid to Jordan under Obama, diving from $938 million in base and supplemental appropriations in FY 2008 and decreasing each subsequent year. This reduction likewise applies to the White House’s $670 million request for FY 2013.
Expanding the scope of FRP II allows DAI/Nathan Group to shift its focus to the creation of a more ideal regulatory environment for PPPs and privatization.
Such an environment, the agency anticipates, will reduce Jordanian government expenditures while improving the quality of governmental services. These developments subsequently will spark economic growth.
Ending FRP II prematurely, USAID maintains, could reduce confidence between the two governments as well as with international financial entities such as the IMF and the World Bank.
Source document: Solicitation #EEM-I-08-07-00009-00
A similar version of this article originally appeared via WND.com Jan. 8, 2013. Rights have reverted back to the author, Steve Peacock, under agreement with WND.
For anybody posting on this thread, tell me, with BS like this considered, what would be so bad about protectionism and isolationism?
Onama’s foreign policy goal: increase friendly country’s taxes, centralization, spending and debt...
The same as his domestic policy goal.
IS THERE ANYONE WHO WILL STOP HIM???
Another thread today poses the question whether the U. S. government "gives" or "takes" (from its citizens, one assumes). My post there may provide some response to the news contained in this thread also.
Only in a country which has erased its founding principles from its textbooks and public discourse could the citizenry consider whether government "gives" or "takes"! Of course, it takes; otherwise, it would have nothing to "give."
The following essay from "Our Ageless Constitution" is reprinted with permission and can be downloaded here.
Tired of having the fruits of their labors confiscated by an overpowering British government, America's Founders declared themselves free and independent.
Most American schoolchildren can recite their claim that ". all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights ... to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Less familiar, however, are these lines from their Declaration of Independence:
"He ( King George III ) has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance .... He has combined with others to subject us, ... imposing taxes on us without our consent."
What, then, did the Founders consider to be the real cornerstone of man's liberty and happiness? On what basic premise did they devise their Constitution? Let them speak for themselves:
| John Adams |
"The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God ... anarchy and tyranny commence. PROPERTY MUST BE SECURED OR LIBERTY CANNOT EXIST"
|
| James Madison |
"Government is instituted to protect property of every sort .... This being the end of government, that is NOT a just government,... nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has ... is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest." |
Their guiding principle was that people come together to form governments in order to SECURE their rights to property - not to create an entity which wilt, itself, "take from the mouths of labor the bread it has earned." What was wrong for individual citizens to do to one another, they believed, was equally wrong for government to do to them.
The right to own property and to keep the rewards of individual labor opened the floodgates of progress for the benefit of the entire human race. Millions have fled other countries to participate in the Miracle of America.
Footnote: Our Ageless Constitution, W. David Stedman & La Vaughn G. Lewis, Editors (Asheboro, NC, W. David Stedman Associates, 1987) Part III: ISBN 0-937047-01-5
Oh my gosh, can’t we just get our fingers out of everybody’s pies?
The question not only is “who” will stop him (and future presidents who engage in similar global giveaways), but how do we stop them? I wish I had an answer that would not result in getting my teaching license — and the ability to feed my family — stripped by the State.
I am equally delighted with and grateful to you for putting the situation in the context of the Founders and their struggle against the British monarchy. It is truly critical that we concerned citizens frame the debate in such terms — and then decide (somehow) what should be done to cease such pilfering from the people.
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