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Morris points out a massive amount of American foreign aid that is overlooked by those who try to paint the U.S. as lacking in generosity. Sources of this aid include:
The Overseas Private Investment Corporation
We have catalyzed $150 billion in private investment overseas, largely in Third World nations, through the efforts of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a public agency whose board is appointed by the president.
The Trade Deficit
Our trade deficit with the rest of the world of $500 billion, a fifth of it with China, creates jobs and fights poverty throughout the world. By opening our markets to Third World trade more than any other nation, we create far, far more wealth in poor countries than all the governmental foreign aid in the world put together.
Debt Relief
And we have led the way in granting hundreds of billions of debt relief to the world’s poorest nations, much of it lent by American banks and the U.S. government.
And Morris points out the errors of those on the Left who decry the trade deficit:
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. ...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.
He’s got more. Read the whole thing.
There are a ton of great, legally free, TrueType fonts here.
From the National Review Online:
...newly released IRS data refute the charge that the Bush tax cuts favored “the rich” and instead show that all income groups benefited from the reforms.
...New IRS data for the 2002 tax year … provide a window into the effects of the initial Bush tax cuts on taxpayers, broken down by income. The results clearly show the across-the-board nature of the tax reductions and refute claims that the changes benefited higher-income taxpayers to the detriment of lower-income households.
...the average rate of taxation for those earning under $75,000 dropped by 2.1 percentage points between 2000 and 2002, while the rate for those earning $75,000 or more declined by only 1.6 percentage points.
... [For households making $200,000 or more, the] average rate of taxation was practically unchanged at 30 percent in 2002 compared with 29.9 percent in 2000.
The first round of Bush tax cuts thus was unquestionably equitable. ...it still managed to spread the benefits of lower tax rates to all income groups in roughly equal measure.
The talking point of the Left that Bush’s tax cuts favored the rich appears to have been incorrect. There were no tax cuts on those earning over $200,000 a year. They paid an average of 29.9% in 2000, and in 2002, after the GWB tax cuts, they paid an average of 30%.
For those earning more than $75,000 a year—they got a tax cut, but it was a lower one than the tax cut for those earning less than $75,000. Those earning less than $75,000 got an average break of 2.1 percentage points, while those earning more got an average break of only 1.6 percentage points.
Update: 1-12-05. Welcome, Carnival of the Vanities readers! This site is proud to have this article included in the latest Carnival of the Vanities, hosted this week by MultipleMentality.
From Orson Scott Card:
I grew up in an era when “calling the doctor” meant that he’d come over to our house and stick an icy stethoscope on the chest of a sick kid while worried parents fretted in the background.
He’d tell our parents to give us orange-flavored chewable aspirins—which were delicious—and to have us drink lots of fluids. Maybe he’d suggest they rub our chests with Vicks Vap-O-Rub. Or give us cough syrup (boy, that codeine sure helped).
No waiting rooms—that only happened when we went to a specialist.
How did medical care become such a nightmare today?
*
The first and greatest cause of the problem is that health care is astonishingly, fantastically better than it was in those days.
The reason so many people have to spent so much more money on prescription drugs is that fifty years ago there were no drugs to treat their condition. They just suffered or died.
Ditto with expensive surgeries, bone and joint replacements, and elaborate diagnosic procedures.
When there was nothing the doctors could do or prescribe, then from that point forward your treatment was free.
In fact, the main cost savings on health care in the old days was death. Dead people don’t require medical treatment. It’s the most effective method of keeping medical costs down.
It’s our very success in keeping people of marginal health alive that made our medical system vastly more expensive.
He also has excellent suggestions for improving the system.
