Word: aid
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...episode should be instructive to a country that has long been beset with doubts about its overall foreign aid program. It is particularly ironic that Washington should have given such a hospitable reception to a big, unexpected outlay in these tight times. Earlier, Congress had been expected to offer stout resistance to an Administration proposal for a $159 million increase, to $6 billion, in economic and military aid worldwide for fiscal 1980. Last week's events probably will not alter that prospect dramatically, but they at least raise the possibility that the nation might be moved to renovate...
...discovered the self-benefits of helping others when it carried out the Marshall Plan with bipartisan fervor beginning in 1948. The U.S. was the first great power to use aid as a major instrument of foreign policy, and over the next two decades the nation was by far the biggest source of such assistance. There were many intricate reasons for America's subsequent disenchantment with foreign aid, but it became pronounced during the Viet Nam War. It was in 1968 that Congress radically slashed the proposed aid budget-by 40%, to a 21-year low of $1.75 billion. Since...
Today U.S. foreign aid is a hodgepodge of programs with a muddle of purposes directed by a multitude of agencies. The main one is the Agency for International Development, and its chief, ex-Governor John Gilligan of Ohio, is leaving next month under pressure, in part because he offended too many people by trying to straighten out his department. AID is tangled up by more than 150 restrictive and sometimes contradictory congressional mandates. It is not astonishing that a program so confused within is so misunderstood on the outside...
Popular misunderstanding takes many forms. One false notion, which undercuts political support for increasing the aid effort, is that the U.S. is still a leader in the field it pioneered. Not so. In the early 1960s the U.S. spent up to .5% of its gross national product on foreign aid but today allocates only .27%. Sweden gives 1.01% of its G.N.P., and Denmark donates .6%. Thirteen nations, including France, Canada, Belgium, Britain, West Germany and Austria give a larger share than the U.S. Says Gilligan: "Last year the people of the U.S. lost more money at the gambling tables...
Jimmy Carter entered office with the hope of doubling U.S. economic development programs by 1982, but he soon curbed this aspiration in the face of a budget-chopping mood. He has pushed some increases through the Congress, with total aid outlays of $5.1 billion for fiscal 1978 and $5.9 billion for fiscal 1979. His current budget proposes just over $6 billion for fiscal 1980, and would have been higher, a White House spokesman said, except that larger sums "might have raised the profile of foreign aid and made it even more vulnerable." The proposed 1980 budget is vulnerable enough. While...