IF APPLE were to come out and announce it planned to zero out the development budget for future years and just decide at the beginning of the year how much spending was warranted, I imagine Apple shares would fall substantially. If the Defence Department were to announce it would no longer engage in multi-year purchasing or staffing programmes, but would zero out its entire budget for future years and decide on a year-by-year basis how many soldiers to have, what to do with them, and how much equipment to buy for them, I think everyone understands that America's defence capabilities would deteriorate rapidly. If Medicare's administrators decided to stop making any promises about how much it would spend in the future and just let the country's health-care providers know on a rolling basis what it planned to pay for next year, I believe America's caregivers and senior citizens would rise up in revolt and bring the political system to its knees. If the NIH were to do away with multi-year funding for medical research, if the transportation department were to end multi-year funding for the nation's highways, if the nation's education systems decided to eliminate all multi-year budgeting for teachers, programmes, buildings and materials, everyone understands that this would render it impossible for anybody in these areas of the economy and society to get anything done. Nobody would be willing to sign a contract with these agencies if they knew the agencies were going to zero out their budgets and potentially eliminate the relevant programme next year.

But for some reason, the leading Republican presidential candidates think it would be a good idea to do this with foreign aid. It is not clear to me why they think anyone would be willing to work with an American foreign-aid establishment that was unable even in principle to make any plans lasting longer than one year. Would you put your organisation's time and energy into working with an American aid initiative on higher education, agricultural extension, medical system capacity-building, epidemiology and disease intervention, climate-change mitigation, transportation enhancement, or anything else that could only promise a one-year budget? You'd have to be a fool. No, I take it back. You might not be a fool. You might just be the kind of organisation that doesn't actually care whether the project comes to fruition, but is willing to take a year's worth of American money regardless.

I understand why a presidential candidate would say something like this. It's because virtually no American voter has any idea what foreign aid is or how it works. They mostly think "foreign aid" is a kind of cash goody America gives away to countries that are friendly to us. And so it makes sense, from this perspective, to zero out the giveaways each year and only reward countries that have been sufficiently obsequious. In fact, this isn't what foreign aid is at all. Foreign aid is supposed to be dedicated to achieving various generous public-minded goals abroad. In, say, Uganda, we have a lot of foreign-aid programmes aimed at reducing the prevalence of HIV/AIDS. In, say, Afghanistan, we have a lot of foreign-aid programmes aimed at improving agricultural yields and streamlining value chains so poor farmers get more of the revenues of their produce. In, say, Cambodia, we have foreign-aid programmes aimed at promoting democratic political values. Like any public-health programme, agricultural-extension programme, or educational programme, these programmes are incapable of accomplishing anything on single-year timelines. One common timeline would be a year to design the programme and get relationships with local partners and governments functioning, another year of running it as a pilot programme while it gets up to speed, and a third year of evaluation to see whether it's really working and should be implemented on a long-term basis. At that point you could zero it out if it doesn't work, or scale it up if it does. If you start out with a one-year budget, though, you'll never get that far. Nobody who's interested in achieving real results will be interested in working with you during that first year, once they realise you don't actually have the budget to see your idea through.

This, in fact, is what's been happening over the past decade-plus, as shorter and shorter periods of review have made American foreign aid increasingly unreliable and impossible to work with. George Packer has a very good article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs on (among other things) the insular, process-obsessed fecklessness of America's efforts to rebuild Iraq. This kind of unworldly, amateurish attitude towards foreign aid is one of the reasons we've struggled there. There are plenty of valid criticisms of American development aid strategies; as one of its severest critics, William Easterly, writes in "White Man's Burden", development aid tends to be overly focused on centralised planning and too responsive to the demands of the donors and experts who fund and design the programmes, rather than the poor people it's supposed to be helping. You will search Mr Easterly's work in vain for a reference to zero-based budgeting. If anything, having to come back to Washington every year to re-convince your donors that your programme is worthwhile greatly exacerbates the problem of donor-driven funding, as your highly-trained development workers spend even more time and paperwork cultivating their patrons rather than trying to help their beneficiaries.

Fortunately, the idea of zeroing out American foreign aid every year will never go anywhere; it's a silly campaign ploy, and after doing its work of winning a few votes from the uninformed and further undermining public comprehension, it will itself be zeroed out. But the irresponsibility of these kinds of statements is one of the reasons why I tend to zero out most of this year's crop of presidential candidates each time I hear them speak.