Cottleston Pie

Comment by mony

2003/11/24 @ 2:36 pm

Of course, this depends on what he’s talking about. I seem to find that you have little to complain about with respect to his foregn policy. And the speech you saw excerpted was a foreign policy speech. Pray what has he not delivered on? He wants to give the Iraqis a grant, i.e., give away the money. The Democrats want to give them a loan, i.e., we get oil. Who here is the oil-grubber?

Now, domestic policy is a whole different bag of tricks.

Comment by Travis

2003/11/24 @ 11:20 pm

True. I don’t expound a whole lot on current foreign policy. There are whole lot of other people talking about it though, so I’m not sure it’s too important for me to speak up. The foreign policy problems I’m most likely to be vocal about — keeping government honest — are applicable to both foreign and domestic matters, but domestic issues are a little less full of unknowns. As a foreign policy example, holding people indefinitely without charges or access to legal representation is definitely something I’m strongly against. Anything that smacks of “The Star Chamber” is antithetical to our society and is about as un-American as can be clearly defined.

About loans vs grants, if my readings in my Environment Politics in Developing Nations class are to be believed (unfortunately I don’t have a reading list), then loans are very often better at achieving their goals than grants. There are exceptions of course. But I think it wrong to assume that grants are always more generous than loans if you really want to help provide a long-term solution.

The World Bank does quite a few studies in this area. Also, Oxfam has had success in this area. Their micro-loans have been disastrously successful. If I remember one case correctly, the peasants were actually paying back the loans and the experimental micro-loan program was making money–which it was not allowed to do according to the grant that sponsored the research in the name of charity. A quick Google search reveals that Oxfam is still proponents of micro-loan systems, Micro-Loans, Macro-Impact (September 8, 2003).

Taking the loan/grant/oil situation as you present it, if we got Iraqi oil as loan repayment, would that lower the price and profitability of oil from the Houston oilers? Given the domestic policy shenanigans, I would look for a hidden angles. There may not be any, but vigilance is our proper duty.