The foreign aid farce?

Thursday blog

Hey, it’s Christmas – the time for giving.

In my 2015 book – The Great Charity Scandal – I wrote one chapter about foreign aid.

In this chapter, I wrote:

In Europe, after the Second World War the US-sponsored Marshall Plan is generally credited for helping war-ravaged European countries to rebuild and become prosperous. So some people have demanded a ‘Marshall Plan for Africa’. There’s only one problem with this demand. Africa has already had its Marshall Plan – several times over. In the last fifty years Africa has been given the equivalent of around ten Marshall Plans. In today’s money, the five-year European Marshall Plan saw about $100 billion – $20 billion a year – being used to rebuild Europe after WWII. In the last fifty years, Africa has received over $1 trillion in aid. So, Africa received about the same every year – $20 billion a year – for fifty years that Europe received each year for just five years. Yet there’s little evidence that those countries getting the most aid have benefited from this aid and a quarter of Sub-Saharan countries, including some of the world’s greatest recipients of foreign aid, are now poorer than they were in 1960.

I’ve just checked the latest figures and (according to Google) apparently In 2024, the total amount of foreign aid given by member countries of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) was approximately $212.1 billion. So, we’re now giving the equivalent of two Marshall plans a year and yet one might be justified in wondering where our money actually goes.

Again in my book written 10 years ago, I show some figures which might explain how our foreign aid money often mysteriously disappears:

I also show the utter hopelessness of throwing our money at countries whose populations are growing to levels the land cannot support and never will be able to support:

But, don’t worry. As you give and give and give, the massive Third-world population explosion might slow down as our Great Leader invites them all to come here so you can pay for them again with Reeves’s endlessly-increasing taxes: