Gary Johnson on foreign aid and fiscal insolvency
In an October 2010 episode, former two-term Governor of New Mexico Gary Johnson told Bob Zadek that he opposed foreign aid on the grounds that the United States was borrowing to finance it. Johnson said the country was bankrupt and that 43 cents out of every dollar spent was borrowed, arguing that government would need to be cut by 43 percent to balance revenues with expenditures. He distinguished foreign aid from military alliances, saying that alliances served American security interests but that aid did not. A Better America (2010)
Johnson returned to the theme in an April 2011 episode, telling Zadek he did not support foreign aid and calling it “crazy to be providing any foreign aid when we’re borrowing 43 cents out of every dollar that we’re spending to do that.” He said he believed the country was on the verge of a financial collapse because it could not pay back $14 trillion worth of debt, and he cited $100 trillion of unfunded entitlement liability. Straight Talk with Gary Johnson (2011)
Zadek framed the discussion in both episodes by contrasting aid with other spending. In 2010 he argued that if the United States would not send 100,000 troops to Germany ab initio, then it should bring them home, and he questioned whether NATO could be defended at all given that the USSR no longer existed. In 2011 he said that $600 or $700 million spent on the Libyan intervention under a humanitarian rationale could have saved more lives if spent on hospitals in the third world. A Better America (2010) Straight Talk with Gary Johnson (2011)
Matt Warner and the outsider’s dilemma
In a March 2020 episode, Bob Zadek introduced Matt Warner, President of the Atlas Network, to discuss Warner’s book Poverty and Freedom: Case Studies on Global Economic Development. Warner said the United States spends close to $50 billion a year in foreign aid and is by far the largest donor in absolute dollars, with most of that going through USAID, the State Department and the Defense Department. He noted that the UN has established a suggested target of 0.7 percent of GDP for donor countries, and that mostly Scandinavians cross that threshold, but that in absolute dollars their contributions are less than 10 percent of the US total. How to leverage resources within the liberty movement (2020)
Warner said the foreign aid community had become introspective about its efficacy, with broad criticisms over the last 20 years about two things: how to measure results, and how often aid does more harm than good. He called this the “outsider’s dilemma,” describing it as the problem any charitable person faces in knowing whether their ideas are the answer for someone else. He gave the example of Uganda, where $300,000 was spent to help a village of 7,000 farmers switch from banana crops to corn crops on the advice of researchers from Columbia University. The village increased its yield, but there was no one to sell the extra crop to and nowhere to store it, and it attracted an infestation of rats; the villagers also lost their old banana crop. How to leverage resources within the liberty movement (2020)
Tied aid and the politics of foreign assistance
Zadek asked Warner about the concept of “tied aid,” which he described as existing both internationally and in the United States when Washington gives block grants to states and cities with strings attached. Warner said that because foreign aid is done through a political apparatus, it is always vulnerable to the politics of the day. He recounted meeting a researcher in Oslo, Norway, who had won a grant from the Gates Foundation to study Norway’s foreign aid. According to Warner, the researcher explained that when Norway became wealthy from oil production in the ’60s and ’70s, it needed a way to get its name on the global stage to join the global oil market, and increasing its foreign aid apparatus gave it entrée to knock on government doorsteps and say it wanted to start a foreign aid program while also being interested in selling oil. How to leverage resources within the liberty movement (2020)
Warner said these things always go together and are hard to parse, and that they are not always evil or malicious but a natural part of the portfolio for any foreign ministry or State Department. He said that too often this nullifies or makes difficult the actual humanitarian and anti-poverty efforts, and that his message was that love or hate foreign aid, people should stop pretending it is going to solve poverty because it is not even designed to do that. Zadek added the example of abortion restrictions and other social concept riders attached to foreign aid depending on which party is in power, saying that once the political process gets involved in deciding where grant money goes, the goals get distorted. How to leverage resources within the liberty movement (2020)
Across episodes
The excerpts show the same question argued in more than one episode, but the treatment shifts between the earlier and later appearances. In 2010 and 2011, Gary Johnson advanced a fiscal argument against foreign aid, tying it to borrowing and the national debt, with Zadek framing the discussion around defense spending, NATO and nation-building. In 2020, Matt Warner advanced a development argument, distinguishing humanitarian aid from long-term development and focusing on the outsider’s dilemma and tied aid rather than on the debt. The earlier treatment is about what the country can afford; the later treatment is about what aid can accomplish.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the name of any bill, the holding of any case, or the amendment any case turned on. They do not give a founding date for the Atlas Network or for USAID, nor do they state the title or field of the Columbia University researchers beyond Warner’s reference to them. The excerpts do not describe the ending of the 2011 episode beyond the point where the caller segment begins, and they do not cover any episode after March 2020.