Stingy is....

....as stingy does.

The United States supplies more than one-fifth of the United Nations' total budget (and 57 percent, 33 percent and 27 percent of the budgets for the World Food Program, the Refugee Agency, and Department of Peacekeeping Operations, respectively). We've been the United Nations' biggest donor every year since 1945. Taxpayers reluctantly agree to such largess because we're told of the good works the United Nations does. And yet, whenever there's a catastrophe, Uncle Sam is asked to dig deep into his pocket for more money.

This is the global equivalent of when the Interior Department closes down the Washington Monument whenever it faces budget cuts of a few percentage points. Nobody wants the Monument to be closed down, so the bureaucrats make it the department's most vulnerable expenditure.

Nobody objects when the United Nations helps victims of natural disasters, so U.N. defenders always use disaster relief and peacekeeping as their chief tool for fundraising. The problem is that the United Nations is not an impartial philanthropic organization. It is a political institution where a broad coalition of nations hope to curtail the power and influence of the United States. France uses the organization to leverage its relatively meager power by rallying African and Arab nations against us. Kofi Annan uses his megaphone to decry the moral and legal legitimacy of American foreign policy. Its Human Rights Committee is festooned with torture states, but it seems capable of issuing only condemnations inconvenient to the United States. And we foot the bill.

Can we please get US out of the UN?

UPDATE: There's more from FoxNews.

"We gave $2.4 billion last year; 40 percent of total contributions by all countries," said U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Andrew Natsios. "We are by far the largest donor -- no one even comes close to us."

In dollar terms, the United States leads the world in foreign aid from government sources. But individual and corporate charity from the United States also exceeds that of any other developed nation, and those donations exceed official government expenditures. Last year, Americans donated billions to international causes.

"Americans give $240 billion overall each year to charity. Only 2 percent of that money is for international causes, so we're talking about $5 billion," said Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Philanthropy Association.