Originally Posted by Villages Kahuna

I think we need both, Steve. But we need to spend carefully, always trying to get the best "bang for the buck". Unfortunately, our Congress puts together spending bills that are a conglomeration of the things asked for by the special interests, creating expensive and ineffective programs. On the foreign policy-military front, we just seem to throw money around the world like we had an endless supply. Seldom do we get a "return on our investment" foreign policy-wise, it seems.

Coincidentally, I have my niece and her husband visiting right now. They are both newly-minted Phd's on their way to their first college tenure assignments in California (I'm in Michigan as I write this). They are both true experts in the politics and anthropology of Africa. When I commented on how effective the Bush anti-AIDs program seemed to be in Africa, my niece politely disagreed.

She commented that, "if you want to count flying a bunch of young staffers into Uganda with piles of money to throw around for no particular purpose a success, go ahead". She then related several examples of the medical and social experts, who knew the situation in the Ugandan society, asking for money for condoms and sex education purposes being turned down by the U.S. reps, who demanded that the money be spent in "sex abstinence" programs. Of course, there was almost nobody except the U.S. junior g-men who thought that abstinence would work in a country where marraige wasn't important and men commonly had multiple sexual partners. That didn't stop the U.S. reps from simply "throwing money around" to anyone who would take it if they agreed to develop or conduct abstinence programs. Most of the money went to known corrupt individuals who "took the money and ran". Uganda has made tremendous progress in AIDs treatment and prevention, but they've done it with private money from donors in the U.S. and elsewhere who were willing to fund the programs that the locals knew would work. The Bush administration takes the credit, and that's OK with me. But I certainly had my eyes opened by two people who lived there and observed what was happening for almost two years.

Like I said, we often don't get much of a bang for the buck. I don't think I need to go into the thousands of examples of waste and corruption in spending U.S. taxpayer's dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They're all a matter of the public record in the GAO Inspector General's annual audits.