Posted on 01/04/2005 5:23:40 PM PST by SandRat
To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it depends on your definition of "charity." To the United Nations, and The New York Times, charity apparently is defined by how much a government offers to those in need from the money its citizens have coughed up to stay out of jail.
To most Americans, charitable giving involves willfully directing cash from their own pockets and giving it to causes they favor - in this case helping the millions who survived the Asian tsunamis.
The widely different mentality comes to the fore in the wake of the comments by U.N. emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland that the initial U.S. response to aiding the victims was "stingy."
But nowhere near all the aid that pours in to help victims of tragedies like these comes from governments. The U.N.-Times mind-set fails to acknowledge that when it comes to charitable giving, the United States dwarfs the rest of the world - and not just in total dollars.
On a weighted basis that takes into account our greater wealth, Americans are the second-most-generous people on Earth.
Americans are, by nature, more skeptical of public bureaucracy and prefer to give away money themselves rather than give it to the government to do it.
The U.N. mentality is predictable. Most of its officials come from countries where the tax rate is so high that no one has much extra money to give to charity.
Egeland's Norway is typical, with a top tax rate approaching 80 percent. Government controls virtually all the money that isn't hidden under the mattress from the tax collectors.
Perhaps that is why Norway's rate of charitable giving from nongovernment sources, adjusted for relative wealth, is a quarter that of the United States.
In all, Americans contributed $241 billion to private charities last year, which dwarfs the total of any other country, according to Philanthropy Magazine.
But, even on a scale that considers giving as a percentage of national wealth, Americans are more generous than everyone but the Israelis, according to a study by Lester Salamon, director of the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
Now, it's clearly true that the U.S. government's initial commitment of $15 million was low, but that was before the scale of the tragedy was known. Secretary of State Colin Powell says eventual U.S. help will be in the billions of dollars.
And although the reaction from Egeland can be expected based on the current acrimony between the United Nations and the Bush administration, there is no reason to cut the Times editorial board slack.
Its view is not surprising, given the Times is the semiofficial mouthpiece of Blue America. The study by the Catalogue of Philanthropy ranked the 50 states on a "generosity index" that measured charitable giving in comparison to state wealth.
Given that they also rank high on measurements of church attendance - which correlates with charitable giving - states in the South, Midwest and Rockies would seem likely to rank high on that index. And, in fact, the 25 most generous states in that index all voted for President Bush.
Perhaps this is one of those situations reflecting the adage that "where you stand is based on where you sit."
Maybe the Times ought to send a foreign correspondent into Red America to find out how the folks there live - and tithe.
But Norway has given $6.69 per citizen privately in tsunami relief (in addition to government aid), and the USA has given $0.41 per citizen privately.
I'm fairly certain those numbers aren't up to date. I think the announced amount of aid from private organizations in the US alone already adds up to more than that.
Numbers based on http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4145259.stm
Yeah it will be interesting to see how it turns out. I am just judging from, for example, the rate of contributions on Amazon, and the number of people that are getting hit up in supermarket checkout lines to add a few dollars on the credit card/ATM machine when they pay their bill. I think there's an awful lot of that money pouring in that hasn't been accounted for yet.
I don't know where you are getting your numbers, but they're wrong.
There are 293,027,571 (July 2004 est.) Americans, and President Bush has pledged at least $350 million, that's about 3 times your number right there.
Oops... I breezed right over the word privately.
I would say the list given in your article is by no means a complete list of donations.
As others have told you, Americans give to hundreds, if not thousands of different agencies and churches. The money is sent out from there.
There is no possible way that the amount is that low.
I am assuming you are Norweigan since you want so badly for this to be a contest.
You know what, even if your numbers are true, which I doubt very, very much, it is for this ONE disaster.
Americans will consistently give in much greater amounts than many in other countries.
I think it's great for other countries to pitch in a bit more finally.
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