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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (210000)	12/6/2006 2:29:15 PM
From: jttmab	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

There are several comments that I can address in one fell swoop. Citing any one individual and their behavior cannot be generalized to a group. You conduct a study of the group and make general conclusions. What your wife does or what you do cannot be generalized to a group. Regarding single women, or wealthy women ...there are studies. Brooks is not the first and only one to do a study on philanthropy. Ralph Nader is in la-la land. Again, one doesn't take individuals and extrapolate to a group. So questioning "the idea that government offers the best solution to social issues", hurts black and hispanic people? In some cases yes. If a particular social issue is ignored by the giving community than the government may be the only entity that can address it [perhaps indirectly]. There is a question about what the nature of the solution is. For example, black communities have long complained about the basic need for jobs. Charities don't often create jobs, but the government can encourage businesses to create jobs by certain tax incentives. The biggest problem I have with Brooks is his obvious bias. If the guy has suggestions for the every entity in the world other than conservatives is it possible that he's done his study with bias. I'm not even sure that Brooks has given thought to his suggestions beyond happy talk. Here's one that I think we would have difficulty assigning liberal/conservative to: "Encourage fund raising among charities by giving more government money to organizations that take fund raising seriously." Happy talk. Let's think about this for a minute. How would the government know whether an organization is taking fund raising seriously? They could give them a call! Hey, are you folks taking fund raising seriously? ... You bet. That doesn't seem like a good way to evaluate. How about if they raise lots and lots of money? That depends on a number of factors. Katrina had national attention. Bush and Clinton had the Katrina fund. They collected lots of money. But then there might be a need in a small community that will never get national attention of any kind. They just won't collect a lot of money ever. Not necessarily because they aren't serious about fund raising, but merely because there's no large audience. The only metric that I can think of that addresses "serious about fund raising" is administrative costs. I think it's widely known that non-profits that are aggressive in fund raising use a higher percentage of their funds to collect more donations. Therefore, a non-profit that uses 20% of it's collection to generate more collections is "better" than a non-profit that only uses 10% of it's collections to generate more collections. Giving more money to a non-profit that uses a higher percentage of its funds goes contrary to everything we've been taught. And if it makes sense for the government to have that approach than maybe it makes sense for the public to take that approach. Maybe I've been doing it wrong all these years! I've been looking at charities that have a very low administrative cost as more preferrable, but Brooks seems to be suggesting that I should be giving to chairities that have a higher administrative cost, because they are more serious about fund raising. I'm more than happy to hear counter arguments to that, but that seems to be what he is suggesting. jttmab