Not to be rude or anything, but I get the feeling that most people here in Denmark are fully aware of approximately how much we spend on foreign aid - which is 1% (one of the highest in the world).

Assuming that a lot of responders DO know the exact number, some people must really have made some wild guesses - like 50%???

I'm really surprised by these results. What can explain it?

Horror.

It would be nice to see how much money the US corporations make by pillaging the natural ressources of the poor country compared to the money paid for foreign aid.

This graph is slightly deceiving and needs to be more specific in terminology. For example, are we speaking strictly of official development assistance, or foreign aid as a whole.

Putting the graph in context by putting some comparisons would also be advisable. The United States is one of the smallest donors in terms of the percentage of gross national income spent on foreign ODA, but in all reality, no countries are truly innocent. Even the best donors like Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands and Norway are not saints, spending less than 1% of their GNI on ODA. The United Nations, during its first few Development Decades, tried to encourage developed states to allocate 1% of their GNI to ODA, but it wasn't until an agreement in Monterrey in 2002 that they lowered expectations to 0.7%, which only 5 of the 25+ OECD countries have actually met. Those countries' ability to sustain those numbers are questionable, too, and have dropped somewhat over the last couple years due to the financial crisis.

I think this is horrifying in a different way- not because of the actual percentage that the US government spends on foreign aid, but because in general, USAmericans believe that the government should be spending less on foreign aid than what they believe is being spent.

I think it is horrifying that we spend any on foreign aid. With the kind of deficit that we have, we are the ones who need aid.

Now, I have another question -

What % of GDP do you think Americans spend on private charity? (Don't cheat!)

Reminds me a lot of this study, showing Americans' real, estimated and ideal wealth distribution:
http://baselinescenario.com/2010/09/28/americans-want-to-live-in-sweden/

(The results? "92% of Americans preferred the Swedish wealth distribution to the United States one. This overwhelming preference was robust across gender, preferred candidate in the 2004 election (Bush Voters: 90.2%; Kerry Voters: 93.5%) and income. Americans also construct ideal distributions that are far more equal than they estimated the United States to be – estimates which themselves were far more equal than the actual level of inequality.)

0.5% (Compared to 0.16% of GDP in government funded foreign aid). Okay, I cheated. :)

Anyway, while it is admirable that that private initiative can raise four times what the government gives, the total is still less than what northern European countries give when neglecting *their* private contributions.

What's interesting here is not how much the US spends on aid (compared to private contrib, or other countries or whatever), but how perceptions work about crap people don't know shit about.

Throw a number about something someone emotionally kinda care about but don't know shit about, they will mostly just answer in zeros, halves, equals or doubles.

If you were to say that $22.5billion (the correct number) of the budget was spent on foreign aid, ppl would reply that ~10bn would be more appropriate.
If you were to say 200bn instead, then the same person would say 100bn would be more appropriate.

If you ask them how much the US spends on foreign aid against other programs (like assign a percentage number to each program) then the number goes down to like 9%, which is still high.

Bilateral aid isn't really used that much for basic needs and development anyway. It's mostly used for economic leverage, as the neediest countries don't get the most aid. Then too, the crops that are used for food aid aren't really determined by the people's needs either. The Department of Agriculture determines what crops to send out based on prices and surpluses. I think xfam doesn't even like food aid, because local farmers can't compete when the markets are flooded with American food aid. Does the US spend more on farm subsidies? I think it's comparable at least. Europe spends more than the US on food subsidies.

The US guarantees the World Bank's loans with a promise to pay if the World Bank defaults. The US also provides like 16 % of the World Bank's budget or guarantees 16% of the World Bank's budget or something. It has 16% voting rights. I am going to be tested on this in a week. I should know. The UN helps too. Don't know how much of that funding is provided by the US.

I don't understand why it matters if someone is Ugandan or American anyway. If a person is suffering, we should try to help as a society. Although that's easier said than done.

I know I've seen similar results where people dramatically overestimate the percentage spent on NASA. That leads me to wonder what people are underestimating. Can it just be military? Should I not be surprised? Or will people overestimate anything suggested and would have to reasses their choices if enough things were included and they worried about summing to 100%?