Friday, December 31, 2004

my paint is sherwin williams

have you seen the american express commercial with robert deniro? we see new york scenes while his voice is heard saying 'my heart... my west side... my earlobe... " etc. at the end he says something like "my city is new york. my card is american express." can't that last sentence be anything? my truck is chevrolet. my sneakers are keds.

Thursday, December 30, 2004

hello

long time listener, first time caller. Lots of people talking, few of them know...

How stingy are we?

I know we're dead last in terms of %GDP giving, and talk of total dollars is biased, intentionally or not, towards the less-stingy picture. If you earn $100k/Yr and give $140 - that's the same 0.14% of your GDP the US gov't gives - you are stingy by my measure and certainly compared to the $20k/Yr family giving $50. But perhaps some of this is a cultural difference. We Americans like to give directly, rather than having our government dedide for us. A better measure of comparative generosity would include not only government direct aid but also state and local contributions to NGO's, contributions by individuals to churches, NGO's, etc, plus the costs of the charitable donation tax deductions from the government, Peace Corp funding, plus the cost of any military re-deployments, plus anything else I missed. Divide that by GDP and I'd be suprised if we weren't somewhere in the middle of the list. If someone would do this math, we could refocus our attention on the victims rather than our own opinions of our relative generosity.

I'd also be suprised if we were at the top of such a list, which would be nice given our ostensible moral superiority.