On Point: In the giving mood

Published June 27, 2006 at midnight

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Warren Buffett's astounding $37.1 billion pledge to charity is the latest rebuke to those who maintain that Americans are misers indifferent to the plight of the world's poor.

What stokes this ugly image, in part, is the undeniable fact that many European countries provide more foreign aid per capita than does the United States. This disparity, the scolds tell us, is a national disgrace - even though total U.S. foreign assistance is greater than any other country's.

"There is no sense in our country of shame or a desire to improve or to be more benevolent, more caring or more knowledgeable about other people who are just in a different world from ours," former president Jimmy Carter complained to a forum at St. Olaf College two years ago. "We really don't care much about what happens to them."

Carter personally is a generous man, so why does he equate American generosity with what government does in our name? Wouldn't most reasonable people agree that it is much easier to have the government write a check on your behalf than to pull out a pen and write one yourself? And yet when it comes to private check writing, Americans don't merely excel - they're in a class by themselves.

"No Western European population comes remotely close to the United States in private charity," writes Syracuse University Professor Arthur C. Brooks for The Philanthropy Roundtable. "Per capita, Americans give three-and-a-half times as much as the French, seven times as much as the Germans, and 14 times as much as the Italians."

Brooks points out that a lot of that generosity is directed overseas, too.

"The U.S. Agency for International Development notes that official U.S. development assistance, at about $10 billion, is roughly 0.1 percent of GDP," Brooks writes, "but this amount is accompanied annually by about $50 billion in aid from private sources, including foundations, religious congregations, voluntary organizations, universities, corporations, and individuals . . . ."

Nearly $31 billion of Buffett's gift is headed toward the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which devotes half of its grants to global health. But those grants will be ignored, of course, in the next comparison between the foreign aid provided by this country and those contributions from the supposedly bighearted nations across the Atlantic.

Integrity vs. Churchill

Having experienced Ward Churchill's unhinged verbal abuse in the early 1990s and having long been aware of his polemical "scholarship," I was not surprised when news broke that he had penned an essay denouncing the victims of 9/11 and justifying further terrorist attacks. But my familiarity with Churchill seduced me into underestimating the gravity of his miscalculation.

I thought at first he would ride out the storm, just as he was so confident he would.

After all, CU officials had never paid attention before to rumors of academic misconduct by Churchill. They never cared when he tried to suppress the First Amendment rights of Denver citizens on Columbus Day. They were amused - or at least the dean of the College of Arts & Sciences was - when Churchill engaged in incendiary rhetoric not much different from what appeared in the 9/11 essay.

And my pessimism was only reinforced when CU President Elizabeth Hoffman raised the specter of a new McCarthyism as a result of the Churchill furor.

Then two things intervened to save the day: spectacular reporting of Churchill's academic transgressions, mainly but not exclusively in this newspaper, and the integrity of Churchill's own colleagues in the professoriate - or at least those charged with examining his work.

The stars were aligned, and for once not in Churchill's favor.

Murtha's clouded vision

The "American presence in Iraq is more dangerous to world peace than nuclear threats from North Korea or Iran, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said to an audience of more than 200 in North Miami Saturday afternoon," according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Unfortunately for Murtha's thesis, an al-Qaida linked group also chose last weekend to proudly release a tape showing the grisly murder of three Russian Embassy workers in Baghdad, two by beheadings.

It's not just that Murtha is wrong about Iran and North Korea. He can't even identify the party in Iraq that is the greatest danger to world peace.

Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes On Point several times a week. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.

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