Let Them Eat PR

The Bush administration has dispatched a major official---well, at least they hope he will be in 2009--Jeb Bush, plus a promise for a geometrically increased pot of money to aid tsunami victims in Asia, which the media is in the process of dutifully reporting.

Let's hope they also report on whether this amount of aid actually gets there. Usually the Bushies count on them not to. So they could announce their sweeping "No Child Left Behind Act" and then quietly de-fund it, or their tremendous aid against AIDS in Africa in a Rose Garden lovefest, and then neglect to allocate the bucks.

Their record in general is pretty poor, as reported by the This Modern World blog:

"According to a poll, most Americans believe the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 percent.

Bush administration officials help create that perception gap. Fuming at the charge of stinginess, Mr. Powell pointed to disaster relief and said the United States "has given more aid in the last four years than any other nation or combination of nations in the world." But for development aid, America gave $16.2 billion in 2003; the European Union gave $37.1 billion. In 2002, those numbers were $13.2 billion for America, and $29.9 billion for Europe.

Making things worse, we often pledge more money than we actually deliver. Victims of the earthquake in Bam, Iran, a year ago are still living in tents because aid, including ours, has not materialized in the amounts pledged. And back in 2002, Mr. Bush announced his Millennium Challenge account to give African countries development assistance of up to $5 billion a year, but the account has yet to disperse a single dollar."

This Modern World