YOUR COMMENTS

The way things are headed we will be among the nation's poor soon enough. A ballooning of debt caused the first Great Depression and it's about to cause another one. This massive fraud with TARP and the stimulus is only getting us decent taxpayers deeper in hock.

Since we're going to be poor anyway let's just keep our money and that way it goes to the poor, namely us. We don't need any government middleman to give money to ourselves. We don't need any government middleman to help each other either.

And the international charities are crooks too.

It's an insult to tell us we need to give while we're in the midst of being robbed.

Violent street protests? You'll see them right here when the people realize how we've been had. A fawning press is the only thing standing between Washington and the pitchforks.
- Rowland, Fremont

Rand's decades-old retort still works: "You will not be stopped." But Castaldo doesn't want to give to the world's poor, he wants ME to. Apart from the multiplier effect of using my money as well as his own--and just to make sure I cooperate, using the government, which has no legitimate power to tax me for foreign charity--what's really going on here is the latest example of the ruinous belief that I am nothing unless I make you change. Far worse than the trillions we have poured into public education and Marxist unions, has been converting America into a nation of door-to-door welfare evangelists who won't tolerate a No answer.

For the record: Our wealth did not make Arabia and Africa poor. Their dictatorships did. Our charity will be seized by their military. Our support for charity organizations will pay for political correctness, as when we banned DDT out of concern for bird eggshells and gave Africa millions of cases of malaria, and when we banned Freon out of theories on the ozone and condemned many housewives to stay at home because they could no longer afford to refrigerate food and had to go to market daily.

Michael, we'll all agree that you are a nice person with honorable impulses. Now, do it on your own dime.
- Spike, Brentwood NH

True compassion is teaching a man to fish, giving him a fish is a subtle form of slavery.

Our country is in such much debt we cannot afford to give more. Giving more will enslave our own children and grandchildren to higher taxes. We must cut back on government spending and solve the pension problems at city, state and federal levels before we spend any more.
- Cathy Peschke, Croydon