Helping the "Have Nots"

Lots of problems are really hard to solve.  But, as Susan reports, it is striking how (relatively speaking) little money it would take to alleviate a lot of suffering and disadvantage.  Certainly, if one asks "what is more important, ice cream, on which the Europeans spend $11 billion, or immunizing children and providing clean drinking water for all, both of which could be achieved for more or less the same amount," the answer is clear.

That said, it is people, not states, who are spending these billions on perfume, ice cream, and cruise ships.  In order for the money they are spending to be re-allocated to immunizations and water-treatment, that money would need to be acquired by states through taxation (or, I suppose, NGOs and charitable organizations through donations).  And, what would be the effects, in all kinds of other areas (economic growth, job creation, prices of goods, etc., etc.) of the policies that would be required in order to acquire the money and reallocate it from ice cream to immunizations?  I just don't know.

Reflecting on the numbers that Susan posted, do we think that Peter Singer is right, and that it is simply immoral for someone who is aware of these numbers to choose to spend her money on ice cream or a cruise instead of giving it to a water-treatment charity?  Or, moving from the private to the public, is it immoral for a state government like California to spend a billion dollars on speculative stem-cell research instead of spending that money to immunize every child?

To be clear -- I don't think I'm disagreeing with Susan, at all, that it would be better if, given a pot of several billion dollars, it went to clean drinking water and immunizations for all, rather than to cruises (even if we take into account all the jobs that would be lost were there no cruise industry.)  (I imagine we could go through the federal budget and find hundreds of billion-dollar items that we would want to trade for immunizing all children.)  But, how do we get there?  Does CST tell us?  Does it, again, give us rules, standards, or principles?