"Getting It Right" by Ed Martin

Hold onto your wallet! The federal government is busy these days giving away our money: billions to AIG; billions to banks like CITIbank; billions to the Big Three automakers. All told, our lawmakers and bureaucrats have committed $7.8 trillion over the past two months for all of these bailouts. What a joke our government is becoming - bailing out everybody and solving none of our problems.

Let me clear: I know that it is Republicans and Democrats doing this. And I blame both parties for the out-of-control spending. A pox on both their houses!

All of this big spending reminds me of perhaps the greatest scandal of this past election: Joe Biden's charitable giving ... or lack thereof. You see Joe Biden, the famous Catholic from Deleware by way of Scranton, Pennsylvania, gave almost nothing to charity over the past ten years. Turns out he is good at giving away our money but not his own!

For all Biden's talk about being a "regular guy" and just like the rest of us, his lack of charitable giving is hard to believe: Biden and his wife earned close to $2.5 million over the past ten years and they gave away - on average - just over $300 per year. During 2007 when Biden was running for President, he gave away a whopping $995 - trying to show he is generous, I guess. Most regular guys I know give a lot more than $300 to their church, their schools, their VFW chapter, or something.

How about this: in 1999, Biden and his wife earned over $200,000 and gave just $120. That is not a typo: the Bidens gave a little more than a hundred bucks. Not to brag, but I gave $120 a few weeks ago in my church because the pastor really put the hard sell on us about giving back.

I happen to be Catholic like Biden and I know we Catholics are less strict about tithing our 10 percent like the Good Book tell us and like our Protestant brothers and sisters do. But, wow, you would think Biden could do better than $120. He's giving us all a bad name.

So, here is my proposal: every candidate for office at every level must list all charitable giving that they do. Let's start with next Spring's mayoral race. Mayor Slay, Judge Irene Smith, and whoever else runs should release these numbers. We deserve to know who is going to be giving away our money and whether they give their own away to charities. The list of charitable giving should be published on the Internet. At the very least, the prospect of us checking out their giving will make candidates give a little more.

Call it the Biden Principle: if you don't give some real money way, you can't give ours away! That seems fair to me.