Posted on 05/26/2009 2:33:14 PM PDT by Red Steel
This time last year, with the presidential race in full swing, the RNC put out an aggressive fund raising pitch: “Good for America – or Good for Obama?”
“It seems the Democrats’ would-be president of the United States of America really believes that the rest of the world’s problems, and approval, trump the interests of Americans when it comes to how we live our lives and where our money is spent,” the RNC wrote in an email to their membership. They called out Obama on one bill in particular that he had introduced in the Senate, the Global Poverty Act of 2007, which they said “would raise the amount of American tax dollars allocated to United Nations’ redistribution efforts to $845 billion.” On his radio show Rush Limbaugh warned that the bill was “just the tip of the iceberg, should he win.”
The bill didn’t pass in the Senate last year. If it had, it would possibly have been vetoed by former President Bush. But with the Democrats’ expanded majority in the Senate this year and Barack Obama in the White House, the bill could easily become law. That’s why it’s big news that the bill has officially been reintroduced into the current session of Congress as the Global Poverty Act of 2009 by Rep. Adam Smith [D, WA-9]. It is now on a clear course towards becoming law. As such, I want to take a minute to address some of concerns about the bill.
The bill would require the President to develop and implement through the Secretary of State a strategy to achieve a set of global poverty-reduction targets, including ones established at the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000. According to the bill’s summary, the strategy should be focused on “the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty, and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day.”
According to the Congressional Research Service, the bill calls on the President’s strategy to include the following measurable targets and components: (1) continued investment or involvement in existing U.S. initiatives related to international poverty reduction and trade preference programs for developing countries; (2) improving the effectiveness of development assistance and making available additional overall United States assistance levels as appropriate; (3) enhancing and expanding debt relief as appropriate; (4) mobilizing and leveraging the participation of businesses and public-private partnerships; (5) coordinating the goal of poverty reduction with other internationally recognized Millennium Development Goals; and (6) integrating principles of sustainable development and entrepreneurship into policies and programs.”
Associating the $845 billion figure with the Global Poverty Act, like the RNC and others have done, is a mistake. The figure comes from a United Nations recommendation that developed countries spend 0.7 percent of their GDP every year to in order to achieve the agreed on Millenium Development Goals. If the United States were to follow this recommendation, we would, in fact, spend $845 billion over the next 13 years. But, nothing in Obama’s Global Poverty Act would commit us to this spending, or, for that matter, hardly any increased spending at all. Although one of the bill’s stated goals – reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day – does come straight from the U.N.‘s Millenium Development Goals, it’s only one of 21 specific targets. And it’s just the target, not the strategy for achieving it, that is included in the bill.
In fact, the Congressional Budget Office, the non-partisan agency in charge of attaching budget numbers to bills in Congress, found that the Global Poverty Act “would cost less than $1 million per year.”
Well, yes, it could, though any new spending stemming from the bill would have to be approved separately by Congress. Requirement (2) of the in the bill calls on the President to include in his strategy “making available additional overall United States assistance levels as appropriate.”
The key thing here is that the bill has no teeth; it would not actually make anything happen besides the creation of a report that would suggesting policies that would themselves have to be approved by Congress and other federal agencies before taking effect. The reality is that this is basically a feel-good bill that let’s the government say they are doing something to address global poverty without actually doing anything. That’s why, for example, the House version of the bill passed the House on a voice vote, meaning that there was so little opposition that neither party cared to challenge it or to even have the roll call data recorded.
Original source: http://www.opencongress.org: Obama’s Global Poverty Bill is Back
This is one where his bumbling economic policy plunges the entire world into poverty, and we get the bill right? /sarc
By the time Obama and the Democrats are done, America will be on the receiving end of any redistribution schemes.
Considering that fact, the bill might have some merit.
What a bunch of crapola!!
This is about income redistribution, from the U.S. to the rest of the World, plain and simple.
Well, it’ll be alot less than the $800B projected over the next 12 years cause our GDP is falling like a rock.
Angry I am, jedi.
How about we take care of ourselves and our broke nation?
We don’t have any money. Any money we have is from the Chinese. Suppose you loan me a thousand dollars. I go to the bar and start flashing cash around, burning hundred dollar bills. Now, am I rich? No. I’m a frickin’ looser burning money I don’t have. That’s “that man in the WH.”
No! No! A thousand times, no! Contact your Representative and Senators: http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/
Bingo.
If the bat-earred wannabe POTUS really wanted to bring about his oft spouted hope and change?
He'd slap modest tariffs on imported goods while offering serious incentives to corporate America to build plants and manufacture product(s) here in the USA.
Both tax rolls and employment would literally soar, overnight.
Of course for [that] reason alone, he won't.
Therein lies yet another insight into just how incompetent, corrupt and convoluted the Marxist imbecile really is.
I know! I know! But Obama seems to believe we should work and give EVERYTHING away to others. He is unAmerican.
“He’d slap modest tariffs on imported goods...”
But then other countries would complain. It is much easier to tax Americans, who are always braying that taxes that pay for humanitarian things are wonderful...
If I posted my true thoughts about this I would be banned from FR.
Or you think about his half-brother, The Family Plan.
My first instinct would be to do something if I had a relative in similar circumstances. My grandmother sent money to relatives back home because a little to her meant a lot to them. And she wasn't a rich person.
HA!!
You're correct about that; however, the premise was if he wanted to.
My carefully crafted escape clause. :o)
Thing is, neighbor?
Something's afoot that even the grrrrrrrrreat zerO, all his imps and harpies and mediot quislings can't do a thing about: The USA's dead busted broke.
Why even other countries [China, Japan et al ad nauseum] have already begun treating the USA the same way people who had the misfortune of knowing the panhandler everyone knew would try hitting up anyone for whatever they could sponge.
We're being regarded as irresponsible overspending deadbeats and others want nothing to do with the impending implosion.
For the USA the jig's up, fini, kaput.
Even if [we] don't know it, they do. ;^)
When did it leave?
Instead of using the Wiki link provided in the article, you might want to search around this site for some better info
http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/index.htm
Like Lazarus, it is back from the dead!
Oh, it’s a lot more than that. Control of small arms, control of pharmaceutical companies, control of energy in the name of climate change and more.......all under the auspices of the UN.
Want to talk about control of pharaceutical companies just go down and sit in the office of an approved U.S. civil surgeon approved to give immigration medicals, then you will truly have your eyes opened as to how far the pharmaceutical companies have control even within your own government let alone within the U.N.!
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