Donating for the Tsunami victims

The population of the United Kingdom is 60 million. I'm sure the vast majority of those 60 million people can afford to part with ten pounds. If 60 million people donate 10 pounds then that's 0.6 billion pounds collected, which at the current exchange rate is over a billion dollars.

The population of the United States is around 300 million. Again. most of those people can afford to part with ten dollars. If everyone in the US donates 10 dollars that would be 3 billion dollars total.

So our running total is now 4 billion dollars US

Canada's population is 32 million people. With every Canadian donating 10 Canadian dollars then that's 0.32 billion Canadian dollars, or at the current exchange rate, a quarter of a billion US dollars.

4.25 Billion US dollars.

Japan has a population exceeding 125 million people. A thousand yes is worth around about 10 US dollars, so a donation of 1000 yen from everyone in Japan would equate to 1 and a quarter billion dollars.

5 and a half billion dollars.

And so far our governments have donated a paltry few million here an there to the people of the countries devastated by the tsunami.

The figures clearly show that if we all pull our weight we can do far better than our governments have so far.

(Population figures taken from wikipedia.org, exchange rates from xe.com)

Why does the government think it can take our money and give it away anyway?  I have no problem with people too rich to know better giving away money, but it sucks that we are all forced to do so as part of our taxes.  I've been to south-east Asia before and the whole place is fucking corrupt.  Sending money there is like sticking cheese it in a rat hole, it's only going to make things worse instead of solve the chronic problems making the region what it is.

I did get a good laugh out of the whole thing upon reading in the New York Times the other day that we are funding psychiatrists to provide long term mental care, though.  Can you imagine people so out of touch that they waste money on psychiatrists when people are lacking food, shelter, and a means to earn a living (fishing boats, etc.)?  If donations were a personal affair at least you could demand your money not be wasted on idiocy like that and/or choose the smarter groups get it.