Forums > General > General Forum> Re: [raferguson] Mexico charitable giving low - Washington Post article

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Aug 18, 2011, 12:32 PM

Re: [raferguson] Mexico charitable giving low - Washington Post article

If you step away from the very narrow "income-based" and "salary-based" definitions of poverty and move instead to the issues of real poverty as hunger and food poverty, the pictures change dramatically. In 2009 the US had 50.2 million Americans living in food insecure households, 33 million adults and 17.2 million children. This shows 16.5% of the US populace in food poverty vs. 18.2% in Mexico. http://feedingamerica.org/...erty-statistics.aspx https://www.cia.gov/...ook/fields/2046.html

If the 40x giving difference claimed by the OP is so significant to how the 2 societies actually function, then why do measures of actual suffering, like food poverty rates - actually show Mexico and the USA are nearly equal: 18.2% vs 16.5%? It is because of the huge differences between Mexico and the USA in: the ways of charitable giving; the differing needs for charitable giving; very different government support of the poor; how many poor Mexicans grow food at home; how many Mexicans actually own their land and homes vs. US bank-owned mortgaged homes; remittances from the US Mexicans directly back to Mexican poor; and how the societies use their wealth.

The simple choice of the USA to allow Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, et al to pump US oil and take the revenues and profits offshore vs. Mexico's choice to use part of their oil revenues to subsidize commodities needed by the poor, makes GDP-based "giving" estimates nearly irrelevant, as proven by approximately the same % of "food poor" people in both countries vs. the 40X difference projected by the OP's claims.

If the GDP and salary based claims were relevant, then the US should have 40X lower rates of food poverty than Mexico, meaning US poverty rates would have to be at 0.4% which they clearly are not. The OP's linkages of drug violence and beheadings to personal charity, then seem as equally hollow as the claim of 40X differences in real giving to the needy.

Just because US citizens write more checks to the needy, does not mean that Mexican society is somehow worse or deficient. I personally see value in using national resources to aid the poor vs. the US depleting their resources through pumping oil, sending the revenues off shore, and giving subsidies and aid to foreign corporations. Said another way, US citizens must write more personal checks, just to stay even with Mexican levels of poverty and hunger, because Americans do not support the poor in other ways.

DonGringo's link to the Harvard study identify and describe how narrow traditional images of philanthropy of rich givers writing checks do not fit the modern realities of the varied methods of current charitable giving. The OP's attempts to mis-characterize Mexican society and compare it to the USA, fail because they use a flawed check-book-giving standard. Since check-book-giving is only a small piece of a much larger puzzle, the OPs conclusions are not representative of reality.
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(This post was edited by YucaLandia on Aug 18, 2011, 12:57 PM)

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