Wednesday, December 29, 2004

"Stingy" wasn't the worst part

Jan Egeland is a UN undersecretary no one had ever heard of but he got his 15 minutes yesterday when he called the US relief for tsunami victims "stingy." I think he has been proved wrong. In fact, horribly wrong.

But what offended me more was this: Egeland thinks the US would donate more if taxes were raised. He argues that our politicians "'believe that they are really burdening the taxpayers too much, and the taxpayers want to give less. It's not true. They want to give more.'" Who knew a Norwegian bureaucrat could be so intimately aware of the American voters' real, unspoken desires? How is it that only Egeland could sense that, although US voters just re-elected a president who promised to make tax cuts permanent, they really didn't mean it? And did you know it IS the business of UN's middle management to set tax policy for its member nations?

Egeland's comments are pure petulance, revealing the true sentiment of everyone at the UN: if only Americans would shut up and give us more money.

UPDATE: You can read a truly intelligent observation here.

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