If you've ever been to Erie, PA
An anonymous donor gave $100,000,000 to the Erie Community Foundation which is to be split between 46 local charities.
Each of the charities will get about $1 million to $2 million. The recipients include a food bank, a women's center, a group for the blind and three universities.The city — and the entire county of 280,000 — could clearly use the money. There is a poverty rate of 19% in this industrial city on the shores of Lake Erie.
5 comments:
Please check with your local economist: poverty is not cured by charity. If it were, it would have long since disappeared.
Rather, poverty is cured by productivity, being able to freely produce and sell products and services others want. To do so successfully requires a transparent rule of law in a civil society. And that explains why, despite all the charity in the form of foreign aid, many third world countries remain impoverished.
Cities and towns in the Rust Belt remain impoverished because productive enterprises have moved away to more business-friendly areas in the Sunbelt or overseas. This is cemented by the local politicians who encourage the culture of dependency and rent-seeking.
After that $200 million is spent, and it will not take very long divided up the way it was, they'll still be just as impoverished as they are now.
I don't think anyone was saying this donation would "cure" poverty.
I only pointed out the poverty level - because as I'm sure you know - poverty has a lot of symptoms or side effects that make life miserable... and the important work done by these charities can help allieviate these symptoms.
The real trick is to see if they can make the money multiple and count more than once. If this donation can grow... it does have the ability to spur the economic growth a city like Erie needs.
I say it's Her Highness Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al Missned of Qatar, affiliated with Carnegie-Mellon. What about that?
I hope they put some of that money toward birth control & teaching the sort of reproductive discipline that the rest of us have learned. Otherwize, they'll be right back in the same place in a few years.
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