Obama Promises Billions for Anti-Poverty Program

When someone is trying to sell someone else a bill of goods they do tend to grossly underestimate the costs and overestimate the benefits. How many government projects are completed at or under budget? How many government programs are closed out when the original goal is completed?

 

Most administrations end up living with the work of the previous ones. I don't think the problem is the result of any one President, one administration, one Congress, or one party. I do think the Democrats think more towards big government social programs but I don't blame them for all of the problems we have. I think it's a national problem. I think we just keep demanding that the government solve all our problems because we someone think they can save us. There's always a plentiful supply of politicians and bureaucrats ready to take our money for the things we demand whether they can work or not. The process skims a lot of corruption and a whole lot more waste. It breeds more dependency upon government. We've come to look no where else for our problems. We are now a young socialist nation. Only the voters can reverse the trend but with the rapid change in the demographics - greed, selfishness, entitlement, jealousy, laziness, ignorance, etc. - of that population I would not bet much on it happening.

 

History has shown that government consistently underestimates the costs of all its grand ideas and the tax payers end up with a lot bigger bill than first suggested and a new program that is never eliminated.

There's no reason to believe any differently from today's promises. The best thing for government to do is absolutely nothing! Then, at least, we can be sure their budget will not be overrun.

Government give away programs for the poor don't work especially if administered by the UN through various rouge regimes when poverty is a major by-product of those regimes.

 

No "give away" involved you say! I have read the act. I do, in fact, read a lot of these "great ideas" that Congress has and lay into them regularly. This one is an open sink hole for give-away! It's all about giving more money for social re-engineering in foreign countries. It's loaded with grand ideas of how to accomplish it. It sets a broad sweeping goal to reduce "... by one-half the proportion of people worldwide, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day." but it doesn't establish any kind of budget cap on the amount to be spent. Here's just one quote from the act: "The United States has recognized the need for increased financial and technical assistance to countries burdened by extreme poverty ..." That sounds like the spending of a lot of money to me on any number of things most of which won't have anything to do with feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, or sheltering the homeless. It'll be just another collection of tax money and redistribution of wealth from our pockets to some corrupt regime in some third world nation.

 

I don't care how it's sugar coated - it's about spending money and lot's of it. It establishes a goal without setting any budget limits. It will only be followed up by more of the same which will cost more and more. History has demonstrated this is the way it works.