Stingy americans, again

Dick Morris has some comments on American stinginess.

According to Nicholas Kristoff, of the New York Times, the amount of aid we give adds up to 15 cents per person per day. He counts another six cents per day from private philanthropy, leaving us trailing behind 22 other countries.

Of course, to get this number, Kristoff counts only the 2% of Americans' charitable contributions that are directly earmarked to foreign philanthropy. The total daily contribution of each American to charity is 2.19, and if even five percent of that goes to foreign countries, that's nearly double Kristoff's estimate.

The US also helps a lot just by being rich. Our trade deficit with the rest of the world represents $500 billion in cash going to foreign business owners around the world.

Morris has some suggestions for increasing the amount of help we provide to the world's poor:

Should we do more to help Third World nations? Yes. But increasing government-to-government foreign aid is not the way to go about it. We need to open our markets further to imports. With 4 percent of the world's population, we still have one-quarter of its wealth. Those supposedly compassionate liberals who advocate protectionism seem to think we should make a profit in our dealings with the other 96 percent of the world. They're wrong. We need to lower or eliminate our sugar, beef, clothing and other import quotas and to repeal our farm subsidies. We can afford to widen our trade deficit and to subject our farmers to fair foreign competition. But these private-sector, capitalist solutions to the problems of Third World poverty do little to get a liberal's juices flowing. If the aid doesn't come from the government, extracted by taxes from American families, it doesn't count.