Stingy Americans?

Absent so long from the blog and then the utter enomity of the earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia and across the Indian Ocean coast is just overwhelming. So much so that when the I heard the US initially pledged just $15 million in aid I thought, "Huh? That can't be right. Jerry Lewis raises about four times that amount every Labor Day Weekend for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. We're spending about 15 times that amount every f-ing day for the war in Iraq. It just didn't sound like the America I knew and grew up in.
And I was right. It wasn't long before that number was more than doubled to $35 million and that was deemed just a begining. That's still a paltry amount given the enormity of this catastrophe, but that's all that was in the coffers of the US Agency for International Development's emergency relief fund. That's it for our "ready cash". Perhaps more aid will be forthcoming but it may take congressional action.
Then again maybe Jan Egeland, UN emergency relief coordinator, was looking at the percentage of each nation's GDP when he refered to "many Western countries" as "stingy". (You'll note that he did not single out the US but that is how the right-wingers are taking it; methinks the laddies doth protest too much.) The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's figures on aid report that none of the world's richest countries donated even 1 percent of its gross national product. Norway was highest, at 0.92 percent; the United States was last, at 0.14 percent.
To be fair, we should also notet that last year the US spent $15.8 billion, the most of any nation for "official development assistance" and nearly double that of Japan, the next closest. But as a proportion of what we as a nation earn, it's still seems "stingy".

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article ref: CNN.com - Stingy Americans? U.N. official's comment hits nerve - Dec 28, 2004