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Morris points out a massive amount of American foreign aid that is overlooked by those who try to paint the U.S. as lacking in generosity. Sources of this aid include:
The Overseas Private Investment Corporation
We have catalyzed $150 billion in private investment overseas, largely in Third World nations, through the efforts of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a public agency whose board is appointed by the president.
The Trade Deficit
Our trade deficit with the rest of the world of $500 billion, a fifth of it with China, creates jobs and fights poverty throughout the world. By opening our markets to Third World trade more than any other nation, we create far, far more wealth in poor countries than all the governmental foreign aid in the world put together.
Debt Relief
And we have led the way in granting hundreds of billions of debt relief to the world’s poorest nations, much of it lent by American banks and the U.S. government.
And Morris points out the errors of those on the Left who decry the trade deficit:
Those supposedly compassionate liberals who advocate protectionism seem to think we should make a profit in our dealings with the other 96 percent of the world.
They’re wrong. ...But these private-sector, capitalist solutions to the problems of Third World poverty do little to get a liberal’s juices flowing. If the aid doesn’t come from the government, extracted by taxes from American families, it doesn’t count.
He’s got more. Read the whole thing.
