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Thursday, June 09, 2005

Foreign Aid Myths

According to a poll, most Americans believe that the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 percent. As Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist in charge of the United Nations' Millennium Project, put it so well, the notion that there is a flood of American aid going to Africa "is one of our great national myths."

The United States currently gives just 0.16 percent of its national income to help poor countries, despite signing a United Nations declaration three years ago in which rich countries agreed to increase their aid to 0.7 percent by 2015. Since then, Britain, France and Germany have all announced plans for how to get to 0.7 percent; America has not. The piddling amount Mr. Bush announced yesterday is not even 0.007 percent.

In other words, 99.75% of the federal budget is not foreign aid for poor countries. Now why is it that the American public is, like on so many issues, so misinformed about how much aid we give to poor countries? Obviously the "liberal" media is not doing a very good job of presenting the facts to the public. And more importantly, the right-wing propaganda machine has been yelling and screaming for at least the 40 years I can remember about all the money we "waste" on foreign aid. The clever propagandists on the right don't actually lie and say "we give 24 percent of our budget to poor people." No, they just complain about it so much that people assume it must be that high a percentage. The right-wing distorters never tell their audiences what a miniscule portion of the budget it represents. So no one would suspect that greedy, let-the-poor-die-I-need-a-bigger-tax-cut right-wingers would complain so long and hard about a less than one-fourth of 1% expenditure.

Jack Clark 9:54 PM [+]   
Post #111837924984449271