The World's Most Generous Misers
by Ben Somberg
Extra, Oct 2005 - Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)
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 aid-when 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).
It's 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 is-more than twice the size of Japan's, the second largest, and about as big as economies number 3-10 combined. Considered as a portion of the nation's economy, or of its federal expenditures, the U.S. is actually among the smallest donors of international aid among the world's developed countries.
The Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development compiles statistics on how much Official Development Assistance the world's 22 wealthiest countries give each year. The organization's 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 beliefs-misperceptions around the circumstances of the Iraq War are another good recent example-the disparity between the public's 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 they're more generous than they are.
"Known for generosity"
Coverage of the Bush administration's pledges of aid to Asian nations battered by the tsunami failed to give context to the amounts mentioned, painting the U.S. in a charitable light. The day after the tsunami, the U.S. pledged $15 million in aid; a day later, the total was $35 million. After widespread criticism, the administration upped its pledge three days later to $350 million. The media almost always compared these numbers to the total aid pledges of other countries, not looking at how they ranked as a fraction of the nations' economies. The $350 million pledge, therefore, was the "largest contribution" at the time (CNN.com, 1/1/05).
The administration's line regarding aid giving was exemplified by Colin Powell's words in the days after the tsunami (ABC's Nightline, 12/30/04):
"We are the most generous nation on the face of the Earth. Now, if you measure it as a percentage of GDP, you can make the case that we're not as high as others. But if you measure it as actual money going out the door to help people, we are the most generous nation on the face of the Earth."
Andrew Nations, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, similarly said that "we've never accepted the notion" that aid comparisons by national wealth are relevant (Fox News Channel, 12/29/04): Our GNP dwarves all other countries. Our economy grows much faster. Japan's economy has basically been not growing much over the last decade. And the Europeans have not grown that much, certainly in comparison to the United States. So what some people have done is to use the one indicator that makes us look bad to argue this. And I have to say it is ridiculous.
Fox host Chris Wallace at the end of his interview thanked Nations for "giving us a perspective, a little bit of a reality check on all of this."
Establishing foreign aid giving standards based on the size of a nation's economy is no newfangled idea, though; it was in 1970, after all, that the U.N. General Assembly first supported the standard of developed nations giving 0.7 percent of their GDP towards non-military foreign aid (a percentage that the United States has never come close to reaching). Generosity that isn't measured based on ability to give would inevitably paint smaller countries as stingy-unless they gave an astronomical percentage of their incomes.
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http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Foreign_Policy/Most_Generous_Misers.html
