United States shoud give IMF more funds

Criticizing a plan to provide additional funding for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), House Majority Leader Dick Armey asked, "How can we acquiesce in a plan to vastly expand an international agency that covers other people's debts and undermines free-market processes the world over?"

His rhetoric makes sense. After all, it's not our responsibility to pay other countries' bad loans. And besides, if we bail out the troubled economies this time, how will they ever learn their lesson?

But the federal government just declared a $70 billion budget surplus. One can't argue against IMF funding on the grounds that we don't have the money.

And we can't say, "We don't believe in anything but a purely free-market economy." With the recent $3.6 billion bailout of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund, the Feed shows that it will indeed intervene when the nation's economy is at stake.

So why aren't we helping? If the IMF doesn't receive the money, the financial crisis could very well spread to the United States, but leaders seem more interesting in blaming Japan for its inaction than taking action themselves.

Shamefully, Japan has done more in its second year of economic recession than the United States has done in our year of surplus.

Since we have both the ability and incentive to act, there's not reason why we should push this responsibility onto other nations.