Tuesday, November 30, 2010

American Public Vastly Overestimates Amount of U.S. Foreign Aid

Dear Colleagues

The fact that the American Public is misinformed on this matter should come as now surprise! It would be interested to know anything that the American Public is informed about ... the role of misinformation dominates politics ... dominates marketing ... dominates the media ... and it is no wonder that the American Public ends up being misinformed.

Frankly the knowledge economy that was anticipated when IT (information technology) emerged ... and promptly fueled the the dot.com bubble ... has been hijacked. Our economy is now driven by super-rich kleptocrats who thrive in a world where misinformation flows freely ... and rule of law serves to make the ethically unacceptable quite legal and impossible to stop through any system of due process.

This is not what the American Founding Fathers had in mind.

Maybe with the application of True Value Metrics some sanity might be possible. This is the text of the note that triggered this responce. The text was at this URL http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/

Peter Burgess
American Public Vastly Overestimates Amount of U.S. Foreign Aid

As debates about how to deal with the budget deficit have heated up in recent weeks, a new WorldPublicOpinion.org/Knowledge Networks poll finds that Americans continue to vastly overestimate the amount of the federal budget that is devoted to foreign aid.

Asked to estimate how much of the federal budget goes to foreign aid the median estimate is 25 percent. Asked how much they thought would be an "appropriate" percentage the median response is 10 percent.

In fact just 1 percent of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. Even if one only includes the discretionary part of the federal budget, foreign aid represents only 2.6 percent.

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