Senate Bill 2433 and The Millennium Development Goals

I thought I should go a little more in depth about Senate Bill 2433 mentioned in a previous post.

The bill, sponsored by Barack Obama in the Senate, is called the Global Poverty Act of 2007. Basically, the bill is supposed to help alleviate global poverty.

Critics and conspiracy theorists point to the reference of the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals and claim that the bill will commit the U.S. to banning all small arms, signing the Kyoto Protocol and making our official language Esperanto (joke).

None of this, though, is totally accurate.

First, the bill says that the president will develop a strategy for the "achievement of the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day."

There are eight Millennium Development Goals (MDG). The first one is to "eradicate poverty and extreme hunger." In Obama's bill, it says that the president should develop a strategy for the achievement of the MDG of reducing poverty. It doesn't say anything about the other seven goals. Notice "the" and "of" refer to one goal, the goal of eradicating poverty.

Speaking of the other seven goals, which you can read by clicking the above link, none refer to the International Criminal Court Treaty, Kyoto Protocol, etc. These goals, however, do come from the U.N. Millennium Declaration which does say that member nations should ban small arms, etc.

And guess what? The United States has already agreed to the MDG and U.N. Millennium Declaration. We've already agreed that we will "make an effort" to ban small arms. So Obama's bill does nothing to move us any closer than we already are to implementing the actions contained in the declaration.

But guess what else? Don't tell the U.N. but their declarations, statements, decisions, and opinions are about as binding as a Post-It note. Many countries of lesser stature than the U.S. (i.e. those that do not give the U.N. most of it's operating budget) have proven this by blatantly ignoring the U.N. And there's nothing the U.N. can do about it. Unless of course the U.S. wants something done.

And when the U.S. government agrees to "make an effort" to do anything, like ban small arms, it basically means we won't do it. It's the polite diplomatic way of saying no (years in the diplomatic corps speaking here).

So if nothing the U.N. does is binding, then why do we have the U.N.? Exactly.

But, I will admit that Obama's Global Poverty Act of 2007 does ask the president to spend more tax-payer money (which if you'll remember from the MDG, we've already agreed to do). And yes, it could be as high as $845 billion over 15 years (by the way, we spend that much in one year on defense, not counting Iraq and Afghanistan).

But let's not forget, the president can't spend the money if Congress doesn't approve his budget.

So what does Obama's bill do? Nothing but give the president one more thing to report to Congress about.