Obama aims to 'grow' aid for China
Posted By Steve Peacock On 09/20/2014 @ 4:47 pm In Front Page,Money,Politics,World | No Comments

The Obama administration now has ambitions to expand the number of aid programs to China and is working on deploying a privately contracted overseer to “manage and grow” this development portfolio, WND has discovered.

Obama intends to accomplish that task through the U.S. Trade & Development Agency, or USTDA, which technically is an “independent” White House agency – one that has spent millions on projects in China under both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations.

Those projects have included, among numerous other industry sector-specific programs, 50 climate-change and environmental initiatives since 2001, according to USTDA estimates.

The agency this year began searching for a candidate from the private sector to fill its Beijing-based “program manager” slot. The newly created position includes East Asia-wide responsibilities but has a largely China-centric focus.

Indeed, according to a Personal Services Contractor, or PSC, notice that WND discovered via routine database research, the manager will be tasked with providing “on-the-ground support” to numerous USTDA-initiated U.S.-China cooperation programs.

Those endeavors include the U.S.-China Aviation Cooperation Program, the U.S.-China Energy Cooperation Program, the U.S.-China Health Cooperation Program, “as well as the newly-formed U.S.-China Agriculture Cooperation Program,” the PSC document says.

More freedom, ‘not more government’

Aid to China fulfills USTDA’s mission to simultaneously help “developing nations” and assist U.S. exporters, the agency claims. One trade-policy scholar told WND that while he agrees that China meets that USTDA designation, he rejects the notion that the federal programs and spending overseas are the best ways to boost U.S. trade interests.

“China is still a developing country. The best way to boost exports is to adopt broad-based reforms that make it easier for U.S. companies to compete,” said Bryan Riley, a senior policy analyst from the Heritage Foundation’s Center for International Trade and Economics.
He recommended that the U.S. government pursue specific reforms such as cutting the corporate income tax rate and reducing deficit spending as a means of sparking investment and strengthening the U.S. economy.

“If we want more good jobs in the United States, we need more economic freedom, not more government programs,” Riley continued.

While USTDA arguably is a relatively small agency – its FY 2015 budget request is just under $68 million – it consistently undergoes criticism along with calls for closure. Former Rep. Ron Paul and free-market think tanks such as the Cato Institute regularly denounce it as among the most duplicative and wasteful of all federal entities.

USTDA, Ex-Im Bank and OPIC consequently are among the most egregious examples of “corporate welfare waste,” the Cato Institute concluded in a 2005 report. These and similar organizations “should be terminated,” contends the report’s author, Chris Edwards.

However, the U.S. Department of State – as it has done every year under the past few administrations, under both Republican and Democrat leadership – claims USTDA investments pay tremendous dividends, with the equivalent of $73 in exports resulting from every dollar of agency assistance.

“The FY 2015 request for [USTDA] of $67.7 million will enable the Agency to continue its mission to help U.S. companies create jobs through the export of U.S. goods and services for priority development projects in emerging economies,” State said in its budget justification. “In carrying out its mission, USTDA places particular emphasis on activities where there is a high likelihood for the export of U.S. goods and services during project implementation.”

In addition to paying for climate-change and environmental programs in China, U.S. taxpayers also are footing the bill to help China buy – while subsidizing the investments of U.S. industries that offer – information technology, smart-grid energy and shale gas-extraction products and services, and even consultancy services to guide China in reforming its anti-monopoly laws, as WND reported earlier this year.

China aid: On an upswing?

Although the level of aid to China is miniscule contrasted to other aid recipients – indeed, aid for China had steadily declined under Obama, from $27.2 million in fiscal year 2010 to a proposed $6.8 million for 2015 – questions have been raised in recent years about why the U.S. is giving one of its biggest economic and military competitors any aid at all.

In a 2011 hearing titled “Feeding the Dragon: Reevaluating U.S. Development Assistance to China,” a House Committee on Foreign Affairs panel once criticized plans by the U.S. Agency for International Development to obligate $3.95 million in Development Assistance funds to ”engage China as a partner in addressing climate change.”

Rep. Donald A. Manzullo, R-Ill., chairman of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia and Pacific, acknowledged during the hearing that the expenditure, “while small in the grand scheme of things, is emblematic of the dysfunction in America’s foreign aid spending priorities.”

Alluding to the massive amount of U.S. debt owned by China – which, as of July 2014, amounts to nearly $1.3 trillion in U.S. securities, according to the most recent U.S. Department of Treasury numbers – Manzullo described U.S. assistance to China as “a fool’s errand.”

“What is being proposed here, essentially, is that we borrow money from China to give back to China to help it fix its own domestic problems, many of which were created in the breakneck rush to develop,” Manzullo said. “At the same time, these programs help boost the competitiveness of Chinese manufacturers at the expense of U.S. manufacturers and U.S. jobs.”

“Government needs to clean up its own fiscal trail before helping China clean up its environmental mess,” he continued. “We have enough challenges at home without having to worry about U.S. taxpayer monies funding a Chinese government regime notorious for disregarding international norms of trade, human rights and the environment.”

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URL to article: http://www.wnd.com/2014/09/obama-aims-to-grow-aid-for-china/


Note: Here's another example of US tax payer money aiding communist China:
Educating the Enemy

Zitat

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Do we have a responsibility to shell out some $8 billion per year in taxpayer money to educate over 60,000 communist Chinese students in American universities? That is, the very students who return to China to take jobs, factories and even entire industries away from American workers?
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http://www.augustforecast.com/tag/free_tuition/

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