U.N. Official Calls U.S. Aid "Stingy"

I couldn't believe this when I read it on Drudge:

But U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland suggested that the United States and other Western nations were being "stingy" with relief funds, saying there would be more available if taxes were raised.

"It is beyond me why are we so stingy, really," the Norwegian-born U.N. official told reporters. "Christmastime should remind many Western countries at least, [of] how rich we have become."

"There are several donors who are less generous than before in a growing world economy," he said, adding that politicians in the United States and Europe "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."

In the last couple of years, the "stingy" Americans have freed over 50,000,000 people in Afghanistan and Iraq - no thanks to the U.N. Where was the praise for America from the U.N. then? All we've received is grief and condemnation from that august world body.

The American people are a generous lot, however, they prefer to decide for themselves how much to give and to whom to give it. Americans don't like their generosity to be mandated by the government through higher taxes.

Americans will give more through an array of charitable organizations, but there's a big difference between "giving" and the government "taking". This U.N. idiot obviously doesn't understand that.

The fact is, the global government crowd (see Democrats) would like us to turn our country over to the U.N. and give them the right to raise our taxes as they see fit to meet the world's needs as defined by them. Unfortunately the U.N.'s idea of fairness is to reduce the standard of living in the Western World instead of seeking ways to improve the standard of living in the less developed world. They just don't get it.

The main purpose of American taxes is to provide for our defense and our own government programs. We are not taxed primarily to provide a meals-on-wheels program for the rest of the world. Nor should we be taxed to provide subsidies to the U.N. It's time to turn those folks loose and let them get their funding elsewhere.