Posted on 12/30/2004 6:51:49 AM PST by .cnI redruM
A minimum of 100,000 people recently died in and around Sumatra. They got swept under a massive tidal wave and their bloated bodies are still washing ashore. The world wept and began to raise an effort to provide aid.
An idiot UN bureaucrat, Jan Egeland, who gets payed a higher annual salary than the President of The US, and pays no income tax whatsoever on that money, cavalierly announced that the wealthy nations of the world were stingy. He further opined that this was because they paid too paltry an income tax.
Perhaps his own personal rate of taxation rendered his outlook so niggardly that he really doesn't understand why people got so mad. After perusing the editorial fever swamps of The New York Times this morning, it would seem Jan Egeland has company in his collossal indifference to the plight of the average citizen. Today's unsigned masterpiece actually supports Mr. Egeland's contention, and displays a profound lack of concern for how our government actually works.
The editorial begins with the rather infamous sentence. "Mr. Bush finally roused himself..." and then continues to state that $35mil really isn't a significant contribution. It continues to to state that Colin Powell should feel embarassed at how little our government is giving in disaster relief. This is where the New York Times editorial liars need to leave the tending of their Hamptons Mansions to the illegal alien help and pick up the text book from the basic civics class that they probably slept or snorted cocaine through back in High School.
The US government never gives anything to anyone. It redistributes wealth that is created by others. It does not have a large current reserve of cash and in at least 40 out of the last 50 years, it has operated at a deficit. The US government is allowed to spend money only after legislation has been drafted to appropriate the funds and passed on by both houses of Congress. This gives pretentious blowhards ample opportunity to vote for expenditures prior to turning tergivorate and voting against them.
So the New York Times intentionally ignores or genuinely lacks an institutional understanding of how the US government overspends its dollars. Either way, all the news that's fit to print isn't making it into the copy room and is conspicuously absent from their vapid, Trotskyite editorial page. Leaving the tragedy and the pathetic cheapshot at our president aside, the editorial becomes more turgid as The Constant Reader stifles the human gag reflex and plows on.
But for development aid, America gave $16.2 billion in 2003; the European Union gave $37.1 billion. In 2002, those numbers were $13.2 billion for America, and $29.9 billion for Europe.
This, quite simply, should facially invalidate the entire axiom that this editorial attempts to plant. So the United States, as a solitary country, is giving between 30 to 40 percent of the total amount given by about 18 out of the next 25 wealthiest nations in the world. One year's worth of our contribution probably at least doubles what these other nations expropriate from their taxpayers.
Every country in the EU probably taxes it's own citizens at much higher marginal rate, across every level of earned income, than the United States of America. That quoted statistic completly obliterates the entire point of the NYT editorial smear job. The United States, which has almost the lowest set of marginal tax rates of any modern, industrial nation, is outgiving these other disgusting, yuppie pikers by leaps and bounds.
They threw a set of statistics into their editorial to create a misleading appearance of factual graveman that simply does not exist. As they say in online short hand, "LMAO!!"
Pity they couldn't be bothered to get their collective shorts in a knot over Oil For Food.
Complete and BOLD-faced liars. Detestable.
The ignorance of that editorial is what really got me laughing. I got mad, reread it, and then realized, these people didn't sign their names to it for good reason.
Add $200 Billion we spent to bring justace and freedom to the Middle East.
Add about $1 Trillion we spend each year to secure the world from aggression
Yeah, the NYT was actually selective in picking that incredibly stupid statistic...amazing!
Maybe if other nations spent half of what we spend to maintain world security, we could further increase our lead over them in humanitarian spending.
Or maybe the amount of humanitarian spending required to make the world a decent place to live could drop significantly.
Good point!
niggardly? The NYT using that word? What was their position on the person who was fired for using that word?
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