The Clueless Continent, Continued

And speaking of American ignorance, here's another consequence of the American media's preference for screaming matches about hot-button issues -- in this case, the perennial "why are we helping Ghana instead of Grandma" debate, as the article puts it:

In poll after poll, Americans overwhelmingly say they believe that foreign aid makes up a larger portion of the federal budget than defense spending, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, or spending on roads and other infrastructure. In a November World Public Opinion poll, the average American believed that a whopping 25 percent of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. The average respondent also thought that the appropriate level of foreign aid would be about 10 percent of the budget — 10 times the current level.

Compared with our military and entitlement budgets, this is loose change. Since the 1970s, aid spending has hovered around 1 percent of the federal budget. International assistance programs were close to 5 percent of the budget under Lyndon B. Johnson during the war in Vietnam, but have dropped since.\

Comments

[Parrhesia]

I have found the Blog entry that linked to the exam:
http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/remembering-when-college-was-a-buyers-bazaar/

[Parrhesia]

Not exactly to the point, I just want to bring this link to your attention: An entrance exam of Harvard University anno 1869. Very interesting. There once was something like higher education, even in mundo novo:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvardexam.pdf

[Anselmus]

Agreed!

If popular sentiment is so deeply against foreign aid, it should be simple to recast an entire segment of defense spending (which is about 20 % of the US federal budget) as foreign aid and to correspondingly reduce it. Especially where the recipients seem so intractably resentful of that all that freedom-spreading and prosperity stuff.

[Argaman]

Don't blame the continent - I'm sure Canada and Mexico don't want to be included in this indictment.