[Corporations] FPIF News | Foreign Aid Budget

[IRC Communications]

Dear colleague: John Gershman, co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus, 
suggested that you might be interested in our work. This piece is sent as a 
precursor to a new initiative the Interhemispheric Resource Center is 
launching on global-local links re: the 2004 Election. Please excuse any 
duplications. Best, Siri Khalsa / IRC & FPIF
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What's New at FPIF
"Working to make the U.S. a more responsible global leader and partner"
http://www.fpif.org/

February 25, 2004
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Introducing a new commentary from Foreign Policy In Focus

The More Things Change: Foreign Aid Budget Looks Like a Retread from the 
Cold War
By Jim Lobe

If the  "war on terror" is beginning to look increasingly like the cold 
war, then President George W. Bush's fiscal year (FY) 2005 foreign-aid 
request will not change that impression.

While Bush is proposing to increase funding for his two key anti-poverty 
initiatives, the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) and anti-AIDS money for 
African and Caribbean countries, he is also cutting funds for other key 
humanitarian and development accounts. At the same time, the president is 
asking Congress to increase by more than one billion dollars military and 
security assistance, particularly to key "front-line" states in the "war on 
terror." Those two categories, which include anti-drug aid and 
proliferation categories, would make up nearly one-third of all U.S. 
foreign aid under Bush's request, roughly the same percentage of total 
foreign aid when the cold war reached its height during the 1980s.

Under Bush's proposals, credits for foreign militaries to buy U.S. weapons 
and equipment would increase by some $700 million to nearly $5 billion, the 
highest total in well over a decade. Even including the military credits, 
the total foreign aid proposal, which is included in a record federal 
budget request of some $2.4 trillion, amounts to a mere 5% of what Bush is 
requesting for the Pentagon next year.

Under his plan, military spending--which already constitutes roughly 
one-half of the world's total military expenditures--would rise by some 7%, 
to $402 billion in FY 2005, which begins Oct. 1. That figure does not 
include an anticipated $50 billion more that the administration is expected 
to request to fund military and related operations in Iraq and Afghanistan 
later in the year.

The total budget request now goes to Congress, where even members of Bush's 
own Republican Party say he is unlikely to get everything he wants in view 
of the record budget deficits being forecast well into the future as a 
result of the president's tax cuts and military spending hikes.

Jim Lobe <jlobe at starpower.net> is a political analyst with Foreign Policy 
in Focus (online at www.fpif.org). He also writes regularly for Inter Press 
Service.

See complete new FPIF commentary online at:
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0402budget.html

With printer-friendly PDF version at:
http://www.fpif.org/pdf/gac/0402budget.pdf


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Distributed by FPIF:"A Think Tank Without Walls," a joint program of 
Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC) and Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).

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Also see our Progressive Response newsletter at: 
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Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC)
http://www.irc-online.org/
Siri D. Khalsa
Outreach Coordinator
Email: communications at irc-online.org

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