Priorities

Today's NYT editorial Are We Stingy? Yes is spot on. The U.S. is miserly in its humanitarian aide, especially to poor, under-developed countries.

IMO, this stinginess is what has helped to shape world opinion against the U.S.

I think Juan Cole has it about right.

Second, Bush is an MBA, so he knows very well the difference between absolute numbers and per capita ones. Let's see, Australia offered US $27 million in aid for victims of the tsunami. Australia's population is about 20 million. Its gross domestic product is about $500 billion per year. Surely anyone can see that Australia's $27 million is far more per person than Bush's $35 million. Australia's works out to $1.35 per person. The US contribution as it now stands is about 9 cents per person. So, yes, the US is giving more in absolute terms. But on a per person basis, it is being far more stingy so far. And Australians are less wealthy than Americans, making on average US $25,000 per year per person, whereas Americans make $38,000 per year per person. So even if Australians and Americans were both giving $1.35 per person, the Australians would be making the bigger sacrifice. But they aren't both giving $1.35; the Bush administration is so far giving an American contribution of nine cents a person.

The apparent inability of the American public to do basic math or to understand the difference between absolute numbers and proportional ones helps account for why Bush's crazy tax cut schemes have been so popular. Americans don't seem to realize that Bush gave ordinary people checks for $300 or $600, but is giving billionnaires checks for millions. A percentage cut across the board results in far higher absolute numbers for the super-wealthy than for the fast food workers. But, well, if people like being screwed over, then that is their democratic right.

The NYT editorial sums up the ignorance of the American public:

According to a poll, most Americans believe the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 percent.

Actually, the fact that Bush was able to win a second term sums up this nation's ignorance of anything resembling facts and reality.

It has always troubled me that when non-U.S. people are asked their opinion of the U.S., they respond fairly consistently that they like us as a people, but dislike our policies and most recently, despise the present administration. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda consistently cite our policies as one of the primary reasons for their terrorist actions against us. While I don't believe for a moment that their cowardly, sick, and senseless terrorist actions can in any way be even remotely justified; maybe they have a point. Maybe we should be taking a look at our policies and balancing our priorities.

Why are we so willing to expend $200B USD to wage a senseless war in Iraq, yet we can muster only a paltry $35M plus a couple of Navy ships to help out in what has amounted to the worst natural disaster in recent memory in terms of the numbers of people affected? It goes way beyond the 100,000 or so who have lost their lives. There are an estimated 5 million displaced people in 12 nations as a result of the earthquake and the resulting tsunami. Most have lost everything.

Compare the paltry $35M in reief to the countries affected by the tsunami to the $11.6B that the Bush administration pledged in its hurricane relief package this year. The level of devastation in Florida from the four hurricanes this past year, while significant, pales in comparison to that in Sri Lanka, Thailand, India, and Indonesia.

As some have pointed out, we spend $35M in 3-4 hours in Iraq to kill people, yet when it comes to helping those in dire need, we give bupkiss.

The $200B we have spent (or will spend by the end of this fiscal year) in Iraq could have (IMO) been better spent to fund R&D on alternate energy sources in an effort to wean our nation from its addiction to oil from the middle east. The alternate energy sources might have the side benefit of helping to reduce greenhouse emissions that are causing global warming (which even the Bush administration now admits is a problem... they just refuse to do anything about it). Additionally, it would mean that we wouldn't have to prop up the greedy, despotic, middle-east governments of the oil-rich nations like Saudi Arabia, at the expense of their own people, which fuels the hatred that results in the very terrorism we are ostensibly fighting in Iraq.

The Pacific Ocean is laced with a system of fairly low-tech tsunami early-warning sensors, yet the Indian Ocean is not. I'll leave it to the reader to wonder why. The cost for instrumenting the Indian Ocean with the same technology would have been far less than we are spending now in relief aide ($20-30M USD).

Even here at home, our priorities are screwed up. The Bush administration changed the way that Pell Grants are calculated, cutting off some 80,000 from eligibility. So, it's okay to spend the money to fight a sensless war, but not to educate our own children? It's okay to give tax cuts to the wealthy but not to provide for health insurance for some 40 million of our own citizens?

Maybe, just maybe, we need to rethink our priorities. It just might be cheaper in the long run to be seen as a benevolant nation of generous and caring people than one that is hell-bent on waging war to fight terrorism that has its roots in the desperation of peoples oppressed by governments we prop up for the sake of preserving the flow of oil.

Maybe, for starters, we could fund the tsunami sensor project for the Indian Ocean. A small price to pay to win back some of the hearts and minds of those who believe that our priorities and our policies are all wrong, both here and abroad.