Impeachment’s Biggest Absurdity: Our Toxic Fixation On Useless And Corrupting Ukraine Aid
https://dailycaller.com/2020/01/28/impeachments-absurdity-toxic-corrupting-ukraine-aid/
James Bovard
Contributor
January 28, 2020 10:56 PM ET
The campaign to convict and remove President Donald Trump in the Senate hinges on delays in disbursing U.S. aid to Ukraine. Ukraine was supposedly on the verge of great progress until Trump pulled the rug out from under the heroic salvation effort by U.S. government bureaucrats. Unfortunately, Congress has devoted a hundred times more attention to the timing of aid to Ukraine than to its effectiveness. And most of the media coverage has ignored the biggest absurdity of the impeachment fight.
The temporary postponement of the Ukrainian aid was practically irrelevant considering that U.S. assistance efforts have long fueled the poxes they promised to eradicate – especially kleptocracy, or government by thieves. A 2002 American Economic Review analysis concluded that “increases in [foreign] aid are associated with contemporaneous increases in corruption” and that “corruption is positively correlated with aid received from the United States.”
Then-President George W. Bush promised to reform foreign aid that year, declaring, “I think it makes no sense to give aid money to countries that are corrupt.” Regardless, the Bush administration continued delivering billions of dollars in handouts to many of the world’s most corrupt regimes. (RELATED: Sending Military Aid To Ukraine In The First Place Was A Mistake, And Congress Should Discontinue It)
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, flanked by House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel, and House Committee on Oversight and Reform Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney. (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
Then-President Barack Obama, recognizing the failure of past U.S. aid efforts, proclaimed at the United Nations in 2010 that the U.S. government is “leading a global effort to combat corruption.” The following year, congressional Republicans sought to restrict foreign aid to fraud-ridden foreign regimes. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wailed that restricting handouts to nations that fail anti-corruption tests “has the potential to affect a staggering number of needy aid recipients.”
The Obama administration continued pouring tens of billions of U.S. tax dollars into sinkholes such as Afghanistan, which even its president, Ashraf Ghani, admitted in 2016 was “one of the most corrupt countries on earth.” John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), declared that “U.S. policies and practices unintentionally aided and abetted corruption” in Afghanistan.
Since the end of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has provided more than $6 billion in aid to Ukraine. At the House impeachment hearings, a key anti-Trump witness was acting U.S. ambassador to the Ukraine, William B. Taylor Jr. The Washington Post hailed Taylor as someone who “spent much of the 1990s telling Ukrainian politicians that nothing was more critical to their long-term prosperity than rooting out corruption and bolstering the rule of law, in his role as the head of U.S. development assistance for post-Soviet countries.” A New York Times editorial lauded Taylor and State Department deputy assistant secretary George Kent as witnesses who “came across not as angry Democrats or Deep State conspirators, but as men who have devoted their lives to serving their country.”
After their testimony spurred criticism, a Washington Post headline captured the capital city’s reaction: “The diplomatic corps has been wounded. The State Department needs to heal.” But not nearly as much as the foreigners supposedly rescued by U.S. bureaucrats.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Oct. 31 that the International Monetary Fund, which has provided more than $20 billion in loans to Ukraine, “remains skeptical after a history of broken promises [from the Ukraine govt]. Kiev hasn’t successfully completed any of a series of IMF bailout packages over the past two decades, with systemic corruption at the heart of much of that failure.”
The IMF concluded that Ukraine continued to be vexed by “shortcomings in the legal framework, pervasive corruption, and large parts of the economy dominated by inefficient state-owned enterprises or by oligarchs.” That last item is damning for the U.S. benevolent pretensions. If a former Soviet republic cannot even terminate its government-owned boondoggles, then why in hell was the U.S. government bankrolling them? (RELATED: Did Withholding Military Aid To Ukraine Really Hurt Their Ability To Fight Russia? Evidence Suggests Not)
Transparency International, which publishes an annual Corruption Perceptions Index, shows that corruption surged in Ukraine in the late 1990s (after the U.S. decided to rescue them) and remains at abysmal levels. Ukraine is now ranked as the 120th most corrupt nation in the world — a lower ranking than received by Egypt and Pakistan, two other major U.S. aid recipients also notorious for corruption.
Ukrainian servicemen, members of the election commission, help empty a ballot box to count votes at a polling station on the front line with Russia backed separatists in the town of Zolote, Lugansk region, during the second round of Ukraine’s presidential election in Kiev on April 21, 2019. (ANATOLII STEPANOV/AFP via Getty Images)
Actually, the best gauge of Ukrainian corruption is the near-total collapse of its citizens’ trust in government or in their own future. Since 1991, the nation has lost almost 20% of its population as citizens flee abroad like passengers leaping off a sinking ship.
And yet, the House impeachment hearings and much of the media gushed over career U.S. government officials despite their strikeouts. It was akin to a congressional committee resurrecting Col. George S. Custer in 1877 and fawning as he offered personal insights in dealing with uprisings by Sioux Indians (while carefully avoiding awkward questions about the previous year at the Little Big Horn).
Foreign aid is virtue signaling with other people’s money. As long the aid spawns press releases and photo opportunities for presidents and members of Congress and campaign donations from corporate and other beneficiaries, little else matters. Congress almost never conducts thorough investigations into the failure of aid programs despite their legendary pratfalls. The Agency for International Development ludicrously evaluated its programs in Afghanistan based on their “burn rate” – whether they were spending money as quickly as possible, almost regardless of the results. SIGAR’s John Sopko “found a USAID lessons-learned report from 1980s on Afghan reconstruction but nobody at AID had read it.” (RELATED: Fiona Hill Wrote 2015 Op-Ed Opposing U.S. Aid To Ukraine)
After driving around the world, investment guru Jim Rogers declared: “Most foreign aid winds up with outside consultants, the local military, corrupt bureaucrats, the new NGO [nongovernmental organizations] administrators, and Mercedes dealers.” After the Obama administration promised massive aid to Ukraine in 2014, Hunter Biden jumped on the gravy train – as did legions of well-connected Washingtonians and other hustlers around the nation. Similar largesse assures that there will never be a shortage of overpaid individuals and hired think tanks ready to write op-eds or letters to the editor of the Washington Post whooping up the moral greatness of foreign aid or some such hokum.
When it comes to the failure of U.S. aid to Ukraine, almost all of Trump’s congressional critics are like the “dog that didn’t bark” in the Sherlock Holmes story. The real outrage is that Trump and prior presidents, with Congress cheering all the way, delivered so many U.S. tax dollars to Kiev that any reasonable person knew would be wasted. If Washington truly wants to curtail foreign corruption, ending U.S. foreign aid is the best first step.
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12 Reasons to Oppose the Welfare State
Strong Reasons to Be Skeptical of Welfare
https://fee.org/articles/12-reasons-to-oppose-the-welfare-state/
Monday, March 7, 2016
Bryan Caplan
I’m a hard-core libertarian who defines libertarianism broadly. If you think voluntarism is seriously underrated and government is seriously overrated, you’re a libertarian in my book. I also strive to treat others with common decency regardless of their political views. That includes libertarian apostates. People sometimes cease to be libertarians even on my broad definition — and when that happens, the proper reaction is not anger and ostracism, but friendliness and curiosity.
In recent years, I’ve heard many libertarians expressing new-found appreciation for the welfare state. This is most pronounced at the Niskanen Center, but that’s only part of a broader trend. If the revisionist position were a clear-cut, “Sure, most of the welfare state is terrible, but the rest of okay. We should cut social spending by 80%, not 100%,” their libertarian credentials would not be at issue.
When libertarians start describing Danish “flexicurity” with deep admiration, however, I don’t just doubt their libertarian commitment. More importantly, I wonder why they changed their minds. And to be honest, the more I listen to them, the more I wonder. The most enlightening path, I think, is to restate what I see as the standard libertarian case against the welfare state, and find out exactly where they demur. Here goes.
Soft-Core Case
Universal social programs that “help everyone” are folly. Regardless of your political philosophy, taxing everyone to help everyone makes no sense.
In the U.S. (along with virtually every other country), most government social spending is devoted to these indefensible universal programs - Social Security, Medicare, and K-12 public education for starters.
Social programs - universal or means-tested - give people perverse incentives, discouraging work, planning, and self-insurance. The programs give recipients very bad incentives; the taxes required to fund the programs give everyone moderately bad incentives. The more “generous” the programs, the worse the collateral damage. As a result, even programs carefully targeted to help the truly poor often fail a cost-benefit test. And while libertarians need not favor every government act that passes the cost-benefit test, they should at least oppose every government act that fails it.
“Helping people” sounds good; complaining about “perverse incentives” sounds bad. Since humans focus on how policies sound, rather than what they actually achieve, governments have a built-in tendency to adopt and preserve social programs that fail a cost-benefit test. Upshot: We should view even seemingly promising social programs with a skeptical eye.
Medium-Core Case
There is a plausible moral case for social programs that help people who are absolutely poor through no fault of their own. Otherwise, the case falters.
“Absolutely poor.” When Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread to save his sister’s son, he has a credible excuse. By extension, so does a government program to tax strangers to feed Valjean’s nephew. If Valjean steals a smartphone to amuse his sister’s son, though, his excuse falls flat — and so does a government program designed to do the same.
“No fault of their own.” Why you’re poor matters. Starving because you’re born blind is morally problematic. Starving because you drink yourself into a stupor every day is far less so. Indeed, you might call it just desserts.
Existing means-tested programs generally run afoul of one or both conditions. Even if the welfare state did not exist, few people in First World countries would be absolutely poor. And most poor people engage in a lot of irresponsible behavior. Check out any ethnography of poverty.
First World welfare states provide a popular rationale for restricting immigration from countries where absolute poverty is rampant: “They're just coming to sponge off of us.” Given the rarity of absolute poverty in the First World and the massive labor market benefits of migration from the Third World to the First, it is therefore likely that existing welfare states make global absolute poverty worse.
Hard-Core Case
Ambiguity about what constitutes “absolute poverty” and “irresponsible behavior” should be resolved in favor of taxpayers, not recipients. Coercion is not acceptable when justification is debatable.
If private charity can provide for people in absolute poverty through no fault of their own, there is no good reason for government to use tax dollars to do so. The best way to measure the adequacy of private charity is to put it to the test by abolishing existing social programs.
Consider the best-case scenario for forced charity. Someone is absolutely poor through no fault of his own, and there are no disincentive effects of transfers or taxes. Even here, the moral case for forced charity is much less plausible than it looks. Think of the Good Samaritan. Did he do a noble deed — or merely fulfill his minimal obligation? Patriotic brainwashing notwithstanding, our “fellow citizens” are strangers— and the moral intuition that helping strangers is supererogatoryis hard to escape. And even if you think the opposite, can you honestly deny that it’s debatable? If so, how can you in good conscience coerce dissenters?
Personally, I embrace all twelve theses. But even the Soft-Core Case implies radical opposition to the welfare state as it currently exists. My questions for lapsed critics of the welfare state: Precisely which theses do you reject — and what’s the largest welfare state consistent with the theses you accept?
This post first appeared at Econlog.
Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, research fellow at the Mercatus Center, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and blogger for EconLog. He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.
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How Welfare Spending Hurts the People It’s Supposed to Help
https://www.dailysignal.com/2015/08/01/how-welfare-spending-hurts-the-people-its-supposed-to-help/
Paul Winfree / @paulwinfree / August 01, 2015
The current welfare architecture has been a disaster for struggling communities.
Paul Winfree is the director of the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Studies and the Richard F. Aster fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
Federal and state governments spent $1.02 trillion on welfare in 2014—an increase of $274 billion, or 36 percent, since 2003 after adjusting for inflation. At the federal level, the welfare bureaucracy spans numerous agencies and includes more than 80 different means-tested aid programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care and social services to poor and low-income Americans. These programs range from public housing and food stamps to direct cash benefits through the earned income tax credit (EITC) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).
The rapid growth in welfare spending has been driven by two interrelated factors. First, over time, more people above the poverty level have been made eligible for higher benefits. For instance, a forthcoming paper in the journal Demography finds that welfare benefits going to single parents with incomes less than half of the poverty level have decreased by 35 percent over the 1983 to 2004 period, whereas benefits to single parents making almost twice the poverty level have increased by 80 percent.
A second factor driving the growth of welfare spending is the lack of incentives built into the system for states to be good stewards of the federal programs that they administer. About 75 percent of welfare spending is federal, with the remainder contributed by states; however, states administer the programs and therefore have—but do not exercise—the capacity to constrain welfare growth. Instead, states use their discretionary authority to expand welfare while at the same time underinvesting in anti-fraud activities.
For instance, a recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that Massachusetts had just 37 fraud investigators responsible for guaranteeing that no one among the 888,000 people with SNAP benefits, the 1,273,000 receiving Medicaid, and the 92,000 with TANF cash assistance was abusing the program.
Far from being a compassionate series of programs worthy of defense against reform, the current welfare architecture has been a disaster for struggling communities and has done its gravest disservice to recipients themselves. The damage has been twofold.
First, the existing welfare system undermines work. By offering a generous system of entitlements to able-bodied adults without any obligation to work or prepare for work, welfare undermines the need and motivation for self-support. Welfare is primarily a system of one-way handouts: Only two out of more than 80 means-tested welfare programs include even modest work or training requirements.
Second, nearly all of these means-tested welfare programs impose significant penalties against marriage. For 50 years, welfare has driven fathers from the home. As a consequence, single mothers have become increasingly dependent on government aid. Meanwhile, low-income fathers, deprived of meaningful roles as husbands and breadwinners, have drifted into the margins of society. Their attachment to the labor force has deteriorated, and the tendency toward self-destructive and anti-social behavior has increased.
But the greatest victims of the anti-marriage incentives embedded in the welfare system have been children. Children raised without fathers in the home are substantially more likely to experience emotional and behavioral problems, to be expelled from or drop out of school, and to engage in juvenile and adult crime.
Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times has reflected on the unintended negative side-effects of welfare. Analyzing the Supplemental Security Income program for children, he recently wrote that “America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.”
Costing over $1 trillion per year, the current welfare system is enormous, but much of this spending is counterproductive. Today’s welfare programs undermine work and marriage, leading to a broadening pattern of intergenerational dependence and self-defeating behaviors.
Furthermore, if work provides benefits besides monetary compensation (such as a greater connection to society), the fact that welfare discourages work may have severe and immense long-term consequences. This shift in cultural standards is already having deep effects in other areas, such as the ability to build lasting relationships that increase opportunity and general fulfillment.
Welfare should provide aid to those who genuinely need it, but it should also strive to mobilize the best efforts of the poor to help themselves. The foundations of the welfare state must be revamped to promote rather than discourage work and marriage.
To accomplish this, all able-bodied, non-elderly adult recipients of means-tested welfare benefits should be required to work, or at least prepare for work, as a condition of receiving aid. In addition, welfare’s current financial penalties against marriage must be reduced. Reforming the welfare system in this manner would best serve the interests of the poor, the taxpayers and society at large.
Originally appeared in The Heritage Foundation’s 2015 Index of Culture and Opportunity.
