Barack Obama is famously light on legislative achievements, and the one big bill with his name on it is bad news

National Review, March 10, 2008

Barack Obama is famously light on legislative achievements, and the one big bill with his name on it is bad news. As with many on the left, Obama's heart is hostage to the United Nations, and his bill, the Global Poverty Act, would oblige the United States to increase its already generous foreign-aid payments by nearly $1 trillion over a dozen years--on top of what we already give.

(As recently as 1987, the entire federal budget was less than $1 trillion.) The payments are in line with the goals articulated in the U.N.'s "Millennium Declaration." Jeffrey Sachs, the head of the U.N.'s Millennium Project, has suggested that these additional foreign-aid payments should be funded with a gasoline tax. Foreign aid is a corrupt and corrupting enterprise. From the U.N.'s felonious management of the "oil for food" program to the misuse of aid money to enrich brutish dictators and their armies, foreign aid often ends up hurting the poor people of the world rather than helping them. Obama's plan to put a trillion-dollar burden on American taxpayers to curry favor with the United Nations should be rejected.