US Foreign Aid

A high school friend has started a spirited conversation on his Facebook wall with the following statement:

Before our "leaders" in Washington (and I use that term loosely) raise the debt ceiling, here's a thought: Let's stop all the aid money to foreign countries. It's time we kept it for ourselves, at least for awhile.

My response (slightly modified from the original):

I understand [this] sentiment over foreign aid; what he's saying is nothing new. I remember people making the same argument when I first went to college in the early 80s. So I went to the university library to look up the numbers and realized then that the occasional furor over foreign aid was never going to resolve issues with the federal budget. For example, in FY2009 (the last year for numbers that I've seen) total US foreign aid was just under $45 billion. Sounds like a lot. But out of the entire FY 2009 US budget ($3.1 trillion), it makes up only 1.45%. Foreign aid is really the proverbial drop in the bucket, and always has been.

The problem with trying to remove foreign aid is that it magnifies certain problems in other countries and limits the US government's ability to influence foreign policy. Foreign aid is split into two basic categories, military and economic assistance. Remove military assistance, for example, and all those "lily pads" the US military has set up in other countries will be closed by the local governments. Military assistance is often viewed by other countries as a form of rent for the US's military presence in that country. Remove economic assistance and you've begun to destabilize other countries,' economically and socially, often to the US's detriment (e.g., narcotics control and anti-terrorism efforts are classified under foreign aid). Remove any foreign aid, and you've lost a political poker chip, perhaps permanently. Countries won't necessarily do the US's bidding, especially if foreign aid has been removed. (The presence of foreign aid at least acts as a "leash" to help regulate what other countries do.)

Personally, I would prefer to look elsewhere for solutions to solving the budget. For example, the US spent $687 billion on the US military in 2010. The second ranked country, for military expenditure, was China at $114 billion. In fact, the US outspent countries 2 through 21 combined. Secondly, Americans are going to have to realize that US tax rates are low compared to other countries; Americans are under-taxed. According to one economic study, as a percentage of GDP, the US pulled in 25.6% of tax revenues (in 2003), whereas the G7 countries other than the US pulled in 33.9% and the OECD countries other than the G7 countries pulled in 34.7%. If you want the federal government to get its fiscal house in order, you're going to need to pay higher taxes.

[I want to add that I do understand that cutting the US military budget will bring about its own set of consequences, just as cutting the US foreign aid budget would. However, given the size of the military budget's bloat, it's an obvious place to start cutting back. When even the Teabaggers recognize the need to cut back on military spending...]

National Service

Thomas Ricks at Foreign Policy suggests that, instead of re-instituting a military draft, the US government create a three-option national service program:

The military option. You do 18 months of military service. The leaders of the armed forces will kick and moan, but these new conscripts could do a lot of work that currently is outsourced: cutting the grass, cooking the food, taking out the trash, painting the barracks. They would receive minimal pay during their terms of service, but good post-service benefits, such as free tuition at any university in America. If the draftees like the military life, and some will, they could at the end of their terms transfer to the professional force, which would continue to receive higher pay and good benefits. (But we'd also raise the retirement age for the professional force to 30 years of service, rather than 20 as it is now. There is no reason to kick healthy 40-year-olds out of the military and then pay them 40 years of retirement pay.)

The civilian service option. Don't want to go military? Not a problem. We have lots of other jobs at hand. You do two years of them -- be a teacher's aide at a troubled inner-city school, clean up the cities, bring meals to elderly shut-ins. We might even think about how this force could help rebuild the American infrastructure, crumbling after 30 years of neglect. These national service people would receive post-service benefits essentially similar to what military types get now, with tuition aid.

The libertarian opt-out. There is a great tradition of libertarianism in this country, and we honor it. Here, you opt out of the military and civilian service options. You do nothing for Uncle Sam. In return, you ask for nothing from him. For the rest of your life, no tuition aid, no federal guarantees on your mortgage, no Medicare. Anything we can take you out of, we will. But the door remains open -- if you decide at age 50 that you were wrong, fine, come in and drive a general around for a couple of years.
(When The Rich Abandoned America -- and What That Has To Do With Defense)

In general, I don't have a problem with this. Both South Korea and Singapore, where I've lived, have compulsory national service for young men, and in both countries the system seems to work well. (Malaysia also has a national service, but I've gotten the impression that the system may be somewhat dysfunctional. If a national service is implemented it needs to be applicable to everyone; for example, if the above system was used, everyone who is not exempt for certain reasons would have to pick one of the three options.)

South Korea provides for a civilian service in addition to a military service. Those men who chose the civilian service have several options to chose from. The most visible option chosen was that of the police force, in which the young men would work as a foot patrol officer. I also knew a guy who did his civilian service working as a prison officer.

Singapore also has a civilian service in that the men can join either the police force or the civil defense force (fire/ambulance services). The men are also required to continue their service as reservists after their two years of active service until the age of 40 (or 50, depending upon their rank)

Both countries have penalties for not performing national service. In South Korea, I remember a case of a pop musician who had avoided his national service and had left the country to go on tour. When he returned home, he was refused entry back into the country.

The thing that really strikes me about this proposal is that none of it, including the "libertarian opt-out," is really new. Robert Heinlein had his own libertarian opt-out when he wrote Starship Troopers in 1959. In the novel, if a person didn't serve in the military, he was allowed no voice in the running of the government (i.e., through voting). Personally, given the laxity of Americans to vote in elections to begin with, I don't think that penalty goes far enough.

The Economist: Arming Up

This was a very interesting (if extremely short) article in The Economist about military spending per capita:

Israel spends most on defense relative to its population, shelling out over $2,300 a person, over $300 more than America. Small and rich countries, and notably Gulf states, feature prominently by this measure. Saudi Arabia ranks ninth in absolute spending, but sixth by population. China has increased spending by 10% to $85 billion to become the world's second largest spender. But it is still dwarfed by America, whose outlay of $607 billion is higher than that of the next 14 biggest spenders combined.

That Singapore comes in at #4 is a little surprising (I would have expected it to be a little lower down on the list), but I'm not surprised that it and some of the other small countries (Bahrain, Brunei, Kuwait, Oman, and Saudi Arabia) are there: all have valuable assets (mostly oil, and a very modern economy in Singapore) that would make nice war prizes for neighboring countries (witness Iraq's attempted grab of Kuwait back in 1990). Israel's there for the obvious reason (let's not forget that much of that military spending goes for the occupation and oppression of the West Bank and Gaza). The bigger surprise for me is the listing of some of the European countries: Denmark, Greece, Norway and the Netherlands. Is it because the cost of participating in NATO is that high or because owning the best military hardware is that expensive?