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On January 7th, Congress passed legislation allowing Americans to deduct from their 2004 tax returns any tsunami relief donations they make by the end of the month. Normally, taxpayers must take deductions in the year they make donations, but the unprecedented change allows them to forgo a year’s wait. This amnesty will increase the amount that Americans donate to agencies supplying emergency relief to victims of the Christmas Day tsunami in the Indian Ocean, and Congress’s decision to encourage aid in the form of private donations is a fundamentally American gesture. Equally telling is the role of the United States military in the relief effort. As reported by conservative writer Mark Steyn and many others, the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force have taken the lead in providing food, clean water, medical care, and other necessities to the tsunami survivors, especially in Indonesia and Sri Lanka. The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln was sent to the Indian Ocean shortly after the disaster and has since served as a mobile base of operations, dispatching helicopters to airlift supplies to devastated areas. In concert with Australian, Singaporean, Indian, and Japanese forces, American military engineers have rebuilt destroyed water systems and schools. Hundreds of thousands of South Asians owe their lives to the fast action of the American military, especially in light of the fact that U.N. relief efforts only began two full weeks after the tragedy. Yet the United States’ leadership throughout the initial relief effort has not kept the United Nations from claiming American relief work as its own in disingenuous press releases and conferences. Responding to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s claim that the American-led coalition “will be in support of the efforts that the U.N. is leading,” Steyn writes: “American personnel in American planes and American ships will deliver American food and American medicine and implement an American relief plan, but it’s still a ‘U.N.-led effort.’” U.S. economic and military might is saving lives in South Asia. The tax deduction rule change and the militaryled effort in South Asia both embody the American rejection of centralized authority in the distribution and deployment of resources. Instead of extending deductions, Congress could have raised taxes and then funded more tsunami relief directly. By allowing individual taxpayers to decide for themselves how to donate, however, Congress likely made sure that at least as much relief money would be provided. More importantly, individual donors can better scrutinize relief agencies and participate in other charitable organizations with the wherewithal to examine would-be relief providers for efficiency and corruption. In this way, economic decisions are devolved to the individual, though he frequently finds it most fitting to cooperate with others. This devolution is responsible for our unprecedented prosperity. Fortunately for the tsunami victims, the U.S. has consistently refused to relinquish sovereignty over its military affairs to the U.N. Our disproportionately high military spending allows us to project our power far more effectively than any country on the globe. This focus on defense gives us the ability to set up fast, efficient supply lines and effective logistics coordination. By comparison, Canada has a 600-ton disaster relief unit that would be very helpful to the relief effort … if they only had the airlift capability to transport it (The Canadian Air Force has exactly 4 CC-150 Polaris transport planes, each with a capacity of 13 tons). U.S. military funding and deployment do not hinge on orders from on high, and neither does the U.S. economy. Consequently, hundreds of thousands of people in South Asia will survive. | ||||||||||||
