America the Stingy?
"It is beyond me why are we so stingy, really," said Jan Egeland, the Norwegian bureaucrat who heads up relief efforts for the United Nations of the US' initial promise of $15 billion in aid.
Jonah Goldberg expertly dissects the UN budget and US giving in his Town Hall column. (here) Hat tip Real Clear Politics. Besides detailing the hard costs, he analyzes the soft, like how much value we provide the world by keeping the sea lanes clear, deterring North Korea from taking over South Korea, and so on and on.
And he summarzies:
Meanwhile, American citizens, partly thanks to those stingy low taxes, send some $34 billion in private aid around the world every year. That's 10 times the United Nations total budget. America's Christian ministries, private foundations and agencies all do far more in direct charity and aid than the United Nations. But bureaucrats - some who've grown fat on oil-for-food money - measure stinginess in terms of support to the bureaucracy, not to the constituency the bureaucracy was intended to help.
Jonah Goldberg expertly dissects the UN budget and US giving in his Town Hall column. (here) Hat tip Real Clear Politics. Besides detailing the hard costs, he analyzes the soft, like how much value we provide the world by keeping the sea lanes clear, deterring North Korea from taking over South Korea, and so on and on.
And he summarzies:
Meanwhile, American citizens, partly thanks to those stingy low taxes, send some $34 billion in private aid around the world every year. That's 10 times the United Nations total budget. America's Christian ministries, private foundations and agencies all do far more in direct charity and aid than the United Nations. But bureaucrats - some who've grown fat on oil-for-food money - measure stinginess in terms of support to the bureaucracy, not to the constituency the bureaucracy was intended to help.
posted by Laer at 10:23 AM
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