THE "MELTING POT" THEORY SAYS THAT YOU KEEP AMERICA BY GIVING IT AWAY | 2003-09-06
Conservatives worship the melting pot and they say giving America away to third world immigration just makes America more American.
When I was in Washington, the big agricultural lobbies loved foreign aid. America backed trade deals where Russia bought wheat from America and then forgave the loans. While the Soviet Union threatened our very existence, we kept them going with American wheat that American taxpayers ended up paying for.
We kept the Soviet Union going for seventy years with our free food, from the Hoover Commission in 1920 to the very end of the Cold War. Now we do it for North Korea.
Congressmen backing this wheat giveaway to the USSR had a theory. They said that giving free food to other countries was good for America. They used a very complicated economic theory called "the multiplier."
Like so much in economics (I used to teach it) the flaw in this theory was just too boring for people to listen to.
So my answer was different. I said that if giving things away was good for America, we should do good for me, too. Instead of giving stuff to foreigners and getting us all those benefits indirectly, they should give lots and lots of money to ME, right here in the United States.
If that multiplier magic worked out, America would benefit by giving ME billions of dollars at taxpayer expense. And unlike the Russkis, I was not the enemy.
Nobody listened to me. Worse still, nobody gave me a damn thing.