Would Shimon Peres Apply His Critique Of Foreign Aid To America’s Largest Aid Recipient?

[Donnachaidh]

http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/06/23/252651/would-shimon-peres-apply-his-critique-of-foreign-aid-to-americas-largest-aid-recipient/

I’m interested to learn, via Alex Tabarrok, that Shimon Peres is a skeptic about foreign aid:

Look, the West can’t help everyone and the regimes would be insulted if we tried. But they don’t need our help. The greatest poverty in our time has been in China and India. Did these countries reduce poverty because of our help? No. They did it themselves.

Giving is problematic. We take money from poor people in rich countries and give it to rich people in poor countries. Aid sometimes creates corruption.

As Andrew Gelman observes, there’s some pronoun weirdness happening. They don’t need “our” help? Israel isn’t a major source of foreign aid money, rather, according to the Congressional Research Service (PDF), it’s “the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II” and unless you count Iraq continues to be the largest recipient of aid money in annual appropriations. The U.S. doesn’t make a ton of friends internationally by subsidizing Israel so heavily, so it’s mighty strange to see the president of Israel running around knocking the whole concept. Does he think we should cut the money off? That would be an interesting development, to say the least.