Asia fundraising: Dutch government overdoing it
Tuesday, January 11th, 2005
Dutch cabinet gives 200 million extra for Asia (Dutch, sorry).
The dutch government, most notably minister Van Ardenne, has given an extra €200 million in help-funds for Asia. This is on top of the already given €40 million. Corporations and individuals have also raised an additional €112 million for Giro555.
That’s a grand total of €352 million. Now it’s time to put things into perspective. The Netherlands has a population of +/- 16 million people. That’s €22,- per person, which is a lot. Of course, it’s not as if we can’t afford it, that’s not the issue. The real issue is that our government has been cutting costs left and right just to make the yearly budget, whining in the press about the bad economic situation, savagely slaying much needed health care in our own country, but it’s no problem at all coughing up huge amounts of money for a single disaster. Perhaps people don’t realize this, but help efforts have a certain saturation point beyond which money won’t help. I think the global efforts are exceeding this saturation point. Massive ammounts of money will go to waste on useless stuff like management, coordination and transportation. I’m no expert on this kind of stuff, but it would seem to me that once a certain point has been reached, these sort of costs will rise exponentially.
Another issue I’m having with this ‘donation’ is that it’s overdone. Who does our government think they are just throwing our money away like this. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe sending money will help, I donated myself. But I also believe there are a LOT more people that need help in the world and that spreading the resources around a little bit will do much more good. If the public wants to help, we’ll help. Giro555 has proved that. No need throwing another bag’o’money at it.
To me it almost seems as if the government is using this donation to get on the good hand of the dutch public. The Giro555 fundraiser was an extreme success as everybody chipped in. You could actually say that more people than ever overcame their selfishness and donated money, which in turn created quite a strong group/bonding kind of thing. This donation by our government feels like they’re saying: “Look! We’re doing good stuff too! Let us be a part of this!”. It’s.. too fake. It’s hypocritical almost.
I dunno.. don’t take this the wrong way. I do believe in sending help over there. This is just a little over the top, somehow. Disproportional. Undemocratic.