By Brian Carnell

Sunday, January 9, 2005

In the case of corporate giving money and other aid to victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami, its apparently a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

In an op-ed for the Boston, Robert Kuttner complains that the United States relies too much on private aid and not enough on government aid.

Kuttner complains that,

The $350 million pledged by the Bush administration, some of which will be diverted from other relief needs, represents 0.003 percent of our national income. Europe, on average, is spending about triple that.

. . .

The good heart of the American people can be expressed both by personal charitable giving and by national policy. Bush's version of America's good heart is pass-the-buck and the responsibility. His version of bipartisanship is that good old Bill Clinton gets to shill for private money that a decent government would be providing.

The article then degenerates into a complain that corporate taxes aren't high enough. In Kuttner's world, a corporation that donates, say, $15 million to tsnumai relief is in fact stingy and probably borderline evil since it might be paying, say, $30 million less in taxes than a decade ago. That money, after all, is rightly the government's.

In Europe, however, at least one commentator has a slightly different view. Jonathan Freedland in an op-ed for The Guardian, complains that corporations there are not doing their fair share.

Freedland laments, for example, that British Petroleum gave only 1.5 million pounds, which pales in comparison to its annual profits of about 9 billion pounds. Freedland explains this stinginess, thusly,

Today's British companies enjoy some of the lowest tax rates outside America. Now they have the best of both worlds: low tax and no guilty expectation of philanthropy. They can keep almost all their money to themselves.

Freedland ultimately arrives at the same conclusion as Kuttner,

. . . This last week has seen a rare and stirring demonstration of people power. Maybe we ought to turn to the big companies and say: you can no longer have it both ways. Either you give as generously as we do -- or we will take it off you in tax. Either way, it's time to start paying.

Clearly the only rational response to a tsunami in Asia is to increase corporate taxes in the U.S. and UK.

Sources:

Another wave of miserliness from Britain's super-rich. Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, January 5, 2005.

'The good heart of the American people.' Robert Kuttner, January 5, 2005.

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