Conservatives know that Sen. Barack Obama has recently introduced the Global Poverty Act, which some commentators have said would bankrupt America by giving an additional 0.7 percent of GDP to Third World governments.

That may well be true.

But as in the War on Poverty, we are not debating with people who have any grasp of numbers or even reality. We are dealing with the left, whose goal is to suppress debate over wealth distribution, suggesting that anyone who opposes it is a Nazi.

So forget about whether the bill will break our bank and lead Americans into poverty. They aren't listening. Neither are many "conservatives," many of whose pastors have told them that government-enforced socialist wealth sharing (without calling it that) is Christian.

So it is futile to debate from the standpoint of harming the taxpayer. Neither the far left nor the "Christian" right will hear you.

Instead, the debate over this bill must include a component that was lacking in the debate over the War on Poverty, namely, to address the consequences to the recipients themselves.

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Now, in retrospect we know that welfare destroyed our inner cities, particularly black society, in many ways, chief of which was the monetary rewarding of irresponsible mothers who had children not out of a desire for stable families, but because child rearing was personally profitable to them, provided it was fatherless.

Those with stable families, with father present, lost their welfare payments as mandated by the law. Thus they bowed to the wishes of their feminist slaveholders, fruitfully churning out fatherless progeny.

You the taxpayer were paying people to live a dangerous lifestyle that has led to black males having an enormous incarceration rate, up to 60 percent among male high school dropouts. These poor blacks (and also many poor whites) had learned, from their present mothers and absent fathers, the entitlement lesson, namely, that work is for suckers.

But during Lyndon Johnson's presidency, the conservative side of the welfare debate focused solely on whether or not middle-class, mostly white America could afford welfare. They lost because, for the most part, they ignored the most devastating aspect: the foreseeable adverse effects on the poor.

Now, in this second debate, over global welfare, we can learn from our past omission and maybe stop the disaster before it happens, by focusing the debate not on how we the taxpayer will be hit, but on the foreseeable consequences to the recipients.

We now have an unexpected ally in that debate.

A recent exhaustive literature survey by Simeon Djankov, an expert on development aid and member of the World Bank, entitled "The Curse of Aid," shows:

Based on panel data for 108 recipient countries in the period 1960 to 1999, we find that foreign aid has a negative impact on institutions. In particular, if the foreign aid over GDP that a country receives over a period of five years reaches the 75th percentile in the sample, then a 10-point index of democracy is reduced between 0.5 and almost 1 point, a large effect. For comparison, we also measure the effect of oil rents on political institutions. We find that aid is a bigger curse than oil.

This author will be hard for liberal-progressives to ignore, since he is embedded in one of their own institutions. Thus they must face the reality that if aid hurts democracy, then the greater the amounts, the greater the hurt, and not only to the taxpayer – who will probably survive the debacle the way white America survived the War on Poverty – but also to black Africa, where democracy is still a straw to be clutched at.

Incredibly, in a footnote of his paper, Djankov says that targeting aid to countries that comply with democratic guidelines is banned by the U.N. Thus, not only is the aid given without strings attached that would encourage democracy, but worse, strings that would make it effective in helping democratize the Third World are banned. The people who control the organization that Obama yearns to sacrifice your (but especially your children's) wealth to are leftists who start out with ready-made conclusions about wealth sharing, ideologically based conclusions that have nothing to do with studies or anything else related to reality.

But the far left isn't the main problem today. Americans are increasingly enamored of the failed idea of forcing the working class to give to the poor, and not because of academe, the media or other secular institutions, but in large part because of their religious leaders, including "America's pastor," who actually urge Christians to support world socialism schemes like the Global Peace Plan.

These strange "Christians" despise their flocks, ignoring that Christians have been voluntarily giving of their own substance to the poor for 2,000 years, without relying on government for help to do so. And they ignore the biblical mandate to give in love, not extort gifts from helpless taxpayers.

Thus, they fly in the face of Paul's words:

And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor… and have not charity (love), it profiteth me nothing. – I Corinthians 3:13

Beyond that, by politicizing charity and impoverishing Americans (to the tune of over $10,000 per person), the Global Poverty Act would make it more difficult for Christians to continue being the most generous people in the world. Instead, we would make them unwilling donors to the world's most corrupt charity, the U.N.

What can you do?

Send a link to this column to as many people as you can.

Then call your senator and tell him/her that Obama's global welfare plan will hurt black Africans just as national welfare hurt black Americans.

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Donald Hank is a technical translator and editor-in-chief of Laigle's Forum.