Is it just me...

...or is this article criminally idiotic? Please read it and decide for yourself, and if I've made a mistake here, let me know. The pervasive error seems to be a confusion between the proportion of funds allocated to a particular cause with the absolute amount of funding made available. Maybe our hearts would do better to bleed in underdeveloped nations plagued by preventable hunger and curable disease, but how can Salmon claim that donated money does more harm than good?

Salmon also states that "Japan is a wealthy country which is responding to the disaster, among other things, by printing hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of new money. Money is not the bottleneck here: if money is needed, Japan can raise it."


Again, despite my heritage, I'm no expert in economics, but wouldn't an influx of money form outside the country be more helpful than the government printing more? Hasn't the Japanese government's decision to print more money (called "quantitative easing" when that money is then put into foreign bonds and the like, I just learned) in the last few weeks contributed, along with a beleaguered Nikkei, to the steadily falling Yen? Like I said before, someone please correct me if I'm wrong.