Sense you are a Christian, it astonishes me that you think so poorly of your own country. It is not the USA that is not helping our fellow man. You can not name a country that has helped its fellow man more, can you?
In March 1997, a joint poll by the Washington Post, Harvard University and the Kaiser Family Foundation asked Americans which area of federal expenditure they thought was the largest. Was it Social Security (which actually constituted about a quarter of the budget)? Medicare? Military spending? Sixty-four percent of respondents said it was foreign aidwhen in reality foreign aid made up only about 1 percent of total outlays (Washington Post, 3/29/97).
Today, Americans think about 20 percent of the federal budget goes toward foreign aid. When told the actual figure for U.S. foreign aid giving (about 1.6 percent of the discretionary budget), most respondents said they did not believe the number was the full amount (Program on International Policy Attitudes, 3/7/05).
Its no wonder that most Americans think they live in an extremely generous nation: Media reports often quote government officials pointing out that their country is the largest overall aid donor, and the biggest donor of humanitarian aid. But what reporters too often fail to explain is how big the U.S.
economy ismore than twice the size of Japans, the second largest, and about as big as economies number 310 combined. Considered as a portion of the nations economy, or of its federal expenditures, the U.S. is actually among the smallest donors of international aid among the worlds developed countries.
The Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development compiles statistics on how much Official Development Assistance the worlds 22 wealthiest countries give each year. The organizations numbers show that as a portion of Gross National Income (roughly equivalent to GDP), the U.S. now ranks second-to-last in giving, at 0.16 percent. (In 2004, Italy dropped into last place below the U.S.)
The U.S. also gives much less than what the industrialized countries pledged to give at the 1992 Rio Conference, which was 0.7 percent of their GDP. U.S. development aid, at 0.16 percent of GDP, represents less than one-quarter of this promise.
While foreign aid giving is hardly the only issue, domestic or international, on which Americans hold distinctly incorrect beliefsmisperceptions around the circumstances of the Iraq War are another good recent examplethe disparity between the publics perception and the truth in this case is abnormally large. A look at media coverage of U.S. foreign aid giving in the days after the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster of December 26, 2004 helps reveal why Americans might think theyre more generous than they are.
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Williams continued with another standard defense of American generosity: And so it doesnt properly represent the degree of largess and philanthropy that takes place. Either if you consider just government, or if you consider, in addition, an even larger sector, the private sector. Private giving is tremendous in this country.
American private giving during the tsunami crisis was significant, indeed; one month after the tsunami, it was over $400 million, outpacing the U.S. government pledge of $350 million. But just as with government donations, the private giving of Americans was smaller in proportional terms than that of most Western European and Scandinavian countries. That fact didnt slow down NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams (1/7/05), who said that Americans were proving all over again why they are known worldwide for their generosity. Williams made no comment about the generosity of, say, the British or Germans, each of whom sent far more money, per capita, in both private and government donations.
The Worlds Most Generous Misers
We have no policies that lead to the destruction of our fellow man.
Really, so when we dropped 7 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, twice as many than the total bombs dropped in Europe and Asia in WWII, the equivalent at the time as a 500-lb per bomb per Vietnamese inhabitant, that policy did not lead to the destruction of our fellow man?[1]
[1] A People's History of the United States
You speak as if it were fact that the USA is the leader in world terror instead of the main defender of liberty in the world, now don't you?
We feed the world and are far from starving the world, but your animosity towards Republicans forces you to deny this fact. What basic rights have we withheld from the citizens of another country? You make claims out of bitterness rather than facts.
I could easily pull up plenty of examples, but seeing how you will ignore the first two rebuttals I gave, I see it pretty much pointless to discuss these things with someone who refuses to look at your information.