I am a big believer in 'charity starts at home'. I don't like my tax dollars redistributed period but if they are going to do it anyway, make sure the old and the young are taken care of here at home first.
Me too, but the harsh reality is that part of taking care of our own people is preventing the Third World hell-holes from breeding out of control, producing terrorists, environmental destruction, and swarms of illegal immigrants. Just ignoring the problem doesn't work. We've sent huge amounts of "aid" to Mexico over the decades, and all it's gotten us is lots of illegal immigrants, many of them violent gang members. The scary thing is, Mexico has one of the most comprehensive birth control programs in the underdeveloped world, and STILL they have a seemingly endless number of people desperate for any kind of work under horrible conditions, swarming over here so they can feed their 4, 5, 6, 7 children -- sometimes the kids stay back in Mexico for a while, but many eventually end up here too, for the same reasons.
There was an experiment completed a year or so ago, in either Ethiopia or Somalia (can't recall which), that drovw home the dangers of "helping" without curtailing birth rates. There was a village where adults and children alike were chronically malnourished, and there was no water source in the village, so the women spent many hours and many scarce calories every day, walking several miles to fetch water, and carrying back in pails and such, partly to water their struggling little food crops. The do-gooders figured that if they arranged to install a water source in the town, this would raise the standard of living. Crops could get more water, and women would be spending less of their time and energy walking miles to get water. So some sort of piped water system was installed, and everybody had ready access to water right in the village. So did the standard of living increase? Nope. The average nutritional status actually went DOWN, and the birth rate went UP. It just scares me how so may "conservatives" don't get that restricting births is the only way to help third world countries achieve any lasting improvement, and the only way to help ourselves from being overrun by their desperate and ignorant masses.