Have you heard about Obama’s plan to give $845 billion of our money to the United Nations?
August 7th, 2008 at 08:21am Pat Cunningham
Yeah, the Republicans are blowing the whistle on this ridiculous giveaway scheme, which supposedly is aimed at reducing so-called global poverty.
It’s an outrage! Eight hundred and forty-five billion dollars! That’s more than $2,500 for each American taxpayer!
Oh, one other thing about this: It’s not true. In reality, the plan will cost each man, woman and child in America about one-third of one penny per year.
Read all about it HERE.
POSTSCRIPT: Incidentally, this scheme is so controversial that it passed the House on a simple voice vote and is co-sponsored in the Senate by such wild-eyed Marxists as Republican Sens. Richard Lugar and Chuck Hagel.
But the Republican National Committee thinks it’s cause for alarm and accordingly warns against electing its principal sponsor our next president.
Entry Filed under: United Nations, Republican Party, Barack Obama
16 Comments Add your own
1. Mickey Mouse | August 7th, 2008 at 8:45 am
What do you expect from this guy. Just give it away. Watch out it will be Jimmy Carter all over again.
2. Pat Cunningham | August 7th, 2008 at 9:03 am
Mickey: I can’t tell if you’re kidding. Did you read the entire post? Did you read the stuff to which I linked? Obama has no plan to give away $845 billion. It’s a falsehood spread by right-wing loonies. You were just joking, right? If not, heaven help you.
3. hokumboy | August 7th, 2008 at 11:54 am
It’s funny you should mention that Mickey.
If we’d have listened to Jimmy Carter and John B. Anderson’s views on energy conservation those 30 somethin’ years ago we might not be in this fix today.
4. Pat Cunningham | August 7th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Exactly right, Hoke, especially with respect to Anderson (for whom I proudly wasted my vote in the 1980 election).
5. Fred Flintstone | August 7th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Not True ?
Yea, But Pat its such a great story.
This reminds me of the other hundred or so stories I read by Mickey
and his cast of characters on the Rrstar Forums Political Categories.
Leave a dissenting word there and prepare to be bombed into the stone age
But that seems to be the nature of their politics as the Swift Boat Crowd
once again hits the water in hopes of convincing Joe Sixpack to once again
ignore the reality of America 2008, Ignore his lying eyes and ears and once again
vote against his own personal interest.
I’ve concluded this time around that CNNs Jack Cafferty has summed it up in
a nut shell with this quote:
“If any Republican can overcome the wretched stain of eight years of George Bush, and win the White House, we deserve whatever bad things will happen to us.”
Amen Brother, Well Stated
6. Kaus | August 7th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
It wasn’t on Fox News….or Limbaugh…just some low traffic web sites. Yawn….I’m going out to put air in my tires now.
7. Pat Cunningham | August 7th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Kaus: It was in this fundraising letter from Republican National Committee Chairmen Mike Duncan:
“It seems the Democrats’ would-be president of the United States of America really believes that the rest of the world’s problems, and approval, trump the interests of Americans when it comes to how we live our lives and where our money is spent. […]
“A bill he has sponsored in the U.S. Senate, the so-called Global Poverty Act (S. 2433), would raise the amount of American tax dollars allocated to United Nations’ redistribution efforts to $845 billion.
“That’s $2,500 from every American taxpayer, when many in our country already are struggling to make ends meet.”
You didn’t hear about it on Fox or Limbaugh probably because even they recognize how stupid it is.
8. Mike Carroll | August 7th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
There are some, myself included, that believe any of our tax dollars being sent to the UN is a total waste of revenue.
9. Kaus | August 7th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
The RNC gets a figure slightly wrong….sounds similar to Howie Dean saying McCain wants to be in Iraq 100 years….still a yawner non-news piece. I’m done putting air in my tires. Moving on to practicing eliminating jack rabbit starts at the stop light….
I agree with Mike…blow up the UN or move it to Venzuela…no tax dollars should support that terrorists-as-freedom-fighting-anti-US organization.
The fact that the UN which led the way in the food for oil scandal is connected to an Obama initiative even if it is 1 million dollars) is not surprising however.
10. Milton Waddams | August 7th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
What I have been able to determine about the whole deal is this: The S.2433 bill calls upon the State Department to come up with a plan to meet the goals set by a UN resolution from 2002, signed by Pres. Bush, to increase foreign aid to .7% of total GNP of the world’s industrialized nations. Not an additional .7% on top of what we already give. I read somewhere that our current foreign aid is approximately .5% of GNP. This would amount to an increase in our foreign aid giving of .2% of GNP or approximately $18B. For comparisons sake, that $18B figure is 2 months in Iraq.
The $1M cost estimate by CBO is just to produce the plan, not what implementing the plan will cost. So Pat’s original post is a little deceiving as well, but not anywhere near the RNC’s.
Keep in mind, the agreement to give .7% of GNP was already agreed to and signed by President Bush, S.2433 just calls for coming up with a plan to implement what Bush agreed to.
11. Pat Cunningham | August 7th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Kaus says the RNC was only “slightly wrong” in falsely claiming that a program that actually will cost $1 million is going to cost us $845 billion. He then implies that Howard Dean fabricated John McCain’s well-documented suggestion that U.S. troops might remain in Iraq for 100 years. He then joins Mike in expressing disdain for the U.N., as if its failures justify abandonment of its noble concept. I don’t often agree with George W. Bush, but I liked what he said a few years ago: “Free nations will not allow the United Nations to fade into history as an ineffective, irrelevant debating society.” I also should note that Osama bin Laden hates the United Nations, as do most of the terrorist groups in the Middle East. Bin Laden has said: “The United Nations is nothing but a tool of crime. We are being massacred every day while the United Nations continues to sit idly by.”
12. Pat Cunningham | August 7th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Milton: I respectfully dispute your contention that my post is “a little deceving.” The estimated cost of the bill sponsored by Obama is $1 million a year. The measure in no way obligates the United States to pay anything beyond that. Any other U.S. obligations to spend money on the U.N. arise from other laws, not from this bill. As I’ve noted, the bill is so innocuous that it passed the House on a voice vote and has Republican co-sponsors in the Senate.
13. Milton Waddams | August 7th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Pat: Point taken.
I think the important point here that has been largely missed is that the commitment of US money to the UN was done by Bush, almost 4 years ago, but not followed through. Obama’s bill only seeks to come up with a plan for implementing something Bush already committed us to.
Hmmm…that sounds familiar. Kinda like the Iraq War, Bush commits us to it, now someone else will have to come up with a plan for it.
14. kaus | August 7th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Factcheck.org is on my side regarding the DNC’s message portraying McCain as bent on fighting an “endless” war in Iraq. Clever prose linking Mccain to fighting a war…
DNC: We can’t afford four more years with a President who fights an endless war in Iraq. … On the war, McCain scoffed at Bush’s call to leave troops in Iraq for 50 years, saying “Make it a hundred!”
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/smear_or_be_smeared.html
15. Mike Carroll | August 8th, 2008 at 7:02 am
“…He then joins Mike in expressing disdain for the U.N., as if its failures justify abandonment of its noble concept. ”
In 2004 The United Nations Economic and Social Council elected 14 countries to serve on the Commission on Human Rights, the UN’s highest forum for examining civil rights around the world.
Sudan won a seat by acclamation.
Res Ipsa Loquitur.
16. Pat Cunningham | August 8th, 2008 at 7:33 am
Mike: As I’ve often said, I don’t like Latin, per se. (Heh, heh)
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