Today's Washington Post:
The $25 million in questionable spending, meanwhile, is over $50 for every person in D.C. at least 20 years old and certainly a greater amount per taxpayer. It's money taken from taxpayers that is unavailable for them to donate themselves to a charitable cause. Government charity almost seems premised on the belief that money must be taken from taxpayers and redistributed to charitable organizations as people, left to their own devices, would do no such thing.
Any such belief represents a slander as Americans are generous people, donating over $245 billion in 2007. American generosity is impressive not only in an absolute sense, but a relative one too compared to the rest of the world.
In a city ravaged by the highest rate of AIDS cases in the nation, the D.C. Health Department paid millions to nonprofit groups that delivered substandard services or failed to account for any work at all, even as sick people searched for care or died waiting.Government -- particularly here in D.C. -- does few things well, and charity is certainly not one of them.
More than $1 million in AIDS money went to a housing group whose ailing boarders sometimes struggled without electricity, gas or food. A supervisor said she was ordered to create records for ghost employees.
About $400,000 was paid to a nonprofit organization, launched by a man who once ran one of the District's largest cocaine rings, for a promised job-training center that has never opened.
More than $500,000 was earmarked for a housing program whose executive director had a string of convictions for theft, drugs and forgery. After the D.C. Inspector General's Office could find no evidence that he was operating an AIDS nonprofit group, the city terminated the grant but never sought repayment.
All told, the Health Department's HIV/AIDS Administration awarded more than $25 million from 2004 to 2008 to nonprofit agencies marked by questionable spending, a lack of clients, or lapses in record-keeping and care, a 10-month Washington Post investigation found. Many of the groups have since closed or are no longer providing AIDS services.
The $25 million in questionable spending, meanwhile, is over $50 for every person in D.C. at least 20 years old and certainly a greater amount per taxpayer. It's money taken from taxpayers that is unavailable for them to donate themselves to a charitable cause. Government charity almost seems premised on the belief that money must be taken from taxpayers and redistributed to charitable organizations as people, left to their own devices, would do no such thing.
Any such belief represents a slander as Americans are generous people, donating over $245 billion in 2007. American generosity is impressive not only in an absolute sense, but a relative one too compared to the rest of the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment