Politics
Land of the free, home of the stingy
Published 10 January 2005
Tsunami 2: Americans, who think they are uniquely generous, give just five cents a day each to charities abroad
I spent Christmas in Florida, at one of the country's most exclusive retreats for wealthy Wasps; it is a leafy and hermetic community that sees itself as providing an escape from the garish new-money vulgarities of Palm Beach, 30 miles or so south. It is populated almost exclusively by the elderly, though there are a few devilish young whippersnappers under 60 living there. The place is also overwhelmingly right-wing, and just after Christmas invited Senator John Warner - the Republican chairman of the Senate armed services committee, who will turn 78 next month - to deliver a private lecture.
I was surprised, therefore, to see the town's official flag being flown at half-mast on the day after Boxing Day. I assumed that one of the elderly citizens had departed to meet his or her maker, as they do on an all-too-regular basis, but then my companion assured me that it was for a quite different reason: it was to remember the victims of the south Asian tsunami, a zillion worlds of privilege and poverty away.
Yet we did not hear from President Bush for another two full days. He was holidaying at his home in Crawford, Texas, in much the same way as his soulmate Tony Blair was living it up in Egypt. It was left to Colin Powell, the outgoing voice of the Bush administration, to announce that the US government was sending $14m to assist the relief effort in Asia - an astonishingly paltry sum, especially seen from my vantage point in Florida. Many of the houses in that enclave, and certainly most of the residents, are worth more than that.
The following day, the amount of aid from the US duly rose to $35m - still barely two-thirds of what Rupert Murdoch is paying for his new flat in Manhattan, or what the baseball player Pedro MartInez is earning over his four-year contract. Then the administration started to wake up. Bush finally gave a press conference on Wednesday, and by the end of the week the amount of US aid had risen to $350m. On a per capita basis, it is still less than a tenth of what countries such as Sweden and Denmark are donating.
You would not know this, however, if you were relying on the US media. Two of the self-sustaining myths of the United States are that its inhabitants are uniquely, stupendously generous and that they always act in a thoroughly selfless way. Which, presumably, is why the country reacted with such fury to what Jan Egeland, the Norwegian who is the UN's under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs, had to say about relief aid: most of the "rich countries", he said, had become "stingy".
Even though he never even mentioned the US, poor Egeland rapidly became a new hate figure here, like Hans Blix before him - apparently because he was perceived to have taken the name of the US in vain and attacked its intrinsic goodness. He became the target of enraged editorials and countless heated talk-radio shows. "The United States is not stingy," Powell protested, furiously answering a charge that was never actually made.
The argument that the secretary of state then propounded soon developed into a mantra repeated by just about everyone: America is not some little socialist country like Norway, say, where the government takes the people's money and redistributes it as overseas aid. No, rather than relying on big government, Americans put the emphasis on donations from private citizens. Indeed, the US bases its supremely generous philanthropy on the free-market system and personal choice - which, after all, is what made America both unique and great in the first place.
The figures, alas, do not bear any of this out. On governmental aid, the OECD says that the US comes 22nd in a league table of 22 western countries, handing over just 0.14 per cent of its gross national product, compared with Britain's 0.34 per cent, France's 0.41 per cent or Norway's 0.92 per cent.
On funds donated overseas by private citizens, the US-based Centre for Global Development calculates that Americans give less per capita than the Swiss or Irish or Norwegians: private donations amount to just five cents per American per day, compared (say) with 24 cents per Norwegian per day.
It is certainly true that Americans give extensively to charities, though the reasons are not widely understood in Britain. They receive substantial tax breaks for charitable contributions; if you earn $100,000 a year and donate $10,000 of that to charity, for example, you will be taxed only on $90,000. The American Association of Fundraising Counsel says that roughly $240bn was donated to charity by Americans in 2003. But 98 per cent of this never went beyond US shores.
I take no pleasure in documenting this lack of generosity by Americans to overseas causes, but the United States is clearly in need of a reality check. In the past two years, it has become increasingly xenophobic and strident towards the rest of the world - in particular, France and the United Nations. It is becoming aggressively insular. Belatedly, though, the Bush administration realises it now has a public relations opportunity on its hands. Powell said as much in Indonesia on 4 January, when he told reporters that the humanitarian catastrophe "does give the Muslim world, the rest of the world, an opportunity to see American generosity, American values, in action".
Exactly. I took back to Washington a different memory from the fortnight following the tsunami calamity, however. Back among the palm trees of Florida, Senator Warner gave his audience a chilling statistic: the war in Iraq, he said, is now costing $4bn a month. That is $48bn a year - well over twice the amount that Americans gave as overseas aid, both through their government and as private citizens, in 2003.
Will we see a reprioritising, as business-school jargon here puts it, in 2005? I fear I know the answer.
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