In the days following 9/11 or Katrina, I found news items that showed that some charities were not exactly using donations to go to the victims (cursory search).
The American Red Cross, the largest recipient of Katrina donations to the tune of $2.3 billion, is once again accused of impropriety and fraud.
Now this is sad on its own, but this sort of thing does happen. I know I'd be less than happy if my donation were to later fall into a "Credit Cards Profiting From Haiti Disaster" group.
CALLER: Mega Rush Baby dittos. My question is, why did Obama in the sound bite you played earlier, when he's talking about if you wanted to donate some money, you can go to WhiteHouse.gov --

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: -- to direct you how to do so. If I want to donate money to the Red Cross, why do I need to go to the WhiteHouse.gov page and --

RUSH: Exactly. Would you trust that the money is going to go to Haiti?

CALLER: No.
If one is truly interested in helping the victims, it might be a good idea to check into the charity to find out where the donations go. Some outfits try to make this easy.
I will be donating to Food For the Poor, an terrific organization serving those in desperate need in the Caribbean and Latin America. I have written before about the excellent work they do, and the people they serve. And they really do serve. In 2008, over 97% of their donations went directly their programs in aid to the poor.
Regarding the "income tax" comment, I'm sure that France or the UK or other European countries had mobilized their militaries to begin relief efforts almost immediately as well. Unfortunately these many examples haven't found their way into my regular reading. But the "taxes" comment is a fact; "donations" already go toward relief efforts. Giving more is left to individuals to decide, and I don't know how one can argue that this wouldn't be fair.


And regarding the state of Haiti: "No one wants to see the $100 million trove in American emergency aid stabilize the country for awhile, only to see Haiti collapse again from another disaster a few years on." This is wandering away from immediate relief efforts, but as a larger point it does relate. Since it was brought up, as "dictatorship" or whatever, I'll go with this a bit.
Registering 7.0 on the Richter scale, the Haitian earthquake killed tens of thousands of people. But the quake that hit California’s Bay Area in 1989 was also of magnitude 7.0. It killed only 63 people.

This difference is due chiefly to Americans’ greater wealth. With one of the freest economies in the world, Americans build stronger homes and buildings and roads, are better nourished, and have better health care and better search and rescue equipment. In contrast, burdened by one of the world’s least-free economies, Haitians cannot afford to build sturdy structures and roads. (Haitian builders often add sand to their concrete because concrete is so expensive there. The result is weaker buildings.) Nor can Haitians afford the health care and emergency equipment that we take for granted here in the U.S.

More than just anecdotes prove that richer societies are safer societies. Lots of data back up this observation. For example, in a 2005 paper, UCLA economist Matthew Kahn found that, while rich countries experience just as many natural disasters as do poor countries, persons in rich countries are less likely than are persons in poor countries to die from such disasters. Specifically, a country of 100 million people with a per-capita income of $8,000 will experience about 530 fewer deaths from natural disasters each year than will a country with the same population but where per-capita income is only $2,000. Raise the per-capita income from $8,000 to $14,000 and the annual expected death toll from natural disasters falls by another 233 persons.
Haitians are now paying the price for this feeble and corrupt government structure because there is nobody to co-ordinate the most rudimentary relief and rescue efforts. Its weakness is exacerbated because aid has been funnelled through foreign NGOs. A justification for this is that less of the money is likely to be stolen, but this does not mean that much of it reaches the Haitian poor. A sour Haitian joke says that when a Haitian minister skims 15 per cent of aid money it is called "corruption" and when an NGO or aid agency takes 50 per cent it is called "overheads".

Many of the smaller government aid programmes and NGOs are run by able, energetic and selfless people, but others, often the larger ones, are little more than rackets, highly remunerative for those who run them.
All the more reason for competent handling of help for Haiti, and of the enormous ruin there. For this kind of thing, the UN record is, unfortunately, abysmal. Recall the UN response to the 2004 tsunami in Asia, in which the UN humanitarian coordinator at the time, Jan Egeland, accused countries such as the U.S. of being “stingy,” and promised UN transparency in the handling of the funds that poured in by the billions. About a year later, a series of in-depth investigative reports by the Financial Times found minimal UN transparency, lots of UN stonewalling, and as far as the funds could be tracked at all, it appeared that the UN, having received a flood of relief money, was slow on the scene, and had been spending about one-third of every dollar raised on overhead. The real champions of relief were the U.S. military, and private aid groups. (UN “reform” since then has consisted of a lot of talk about reform, a lot more bureaucracy, a lot more money for the UN, and, if possible, even less transparency.)