> American citizens were asked to guess how much US federal spending goes to foreign aid. ... The average guess was a whopping 31%.
What? I'm very curious how people arrived at such a number. I wouldn't be very surprised if people thought it was, say, 5%. But 31% is a wildly implausible number. 15% of people thought it was over half the budget, which is too far from the Lizardman's Constant to just be trolls, but at the same time it's such a wildly high guess that I can't imagine a normal person sincerely making such a guess.
1% was higher than I’d have guessed for transgender people.
It turns out the figures are rounded in that graphic because the source article [0] (posted by another commenter) has it at 0.6% (which is likely rounded too).
Interesting when you consider how much certain topics seem to dominate current political discourse.
A quote I’ve seen going around but not verified conveys that outsized attention quite well: “There are more people with measles right now than there are transgender college athletes”.
Is this quote an example of making the issue seem larger than it is? Measles ”feels” very common although at any one point I guess not that many people have it, but many see it in their family or remember experiencing it. So it feels like a large number. Saying that there are less people in some group does not make it sound that small. Why not say there are under 100 poeple or whatever the number approximately is?
I mixed diseases. English is not my first language. Just checked from wikipedia that it has 20 million yearly cases and assumed it was the mostly harmless kids disease we all had (which is vaccinated against now also I learnt). Anyway why use 20 million cases against 44 athletes (number which might not be correct, but maybe in the ballpark)?
There is rapidly spreading outbreak of measles which makes news right now - 250 cases. Measles are that rare now
It is super contagious, so yes, prior vaccines everyone got it. Mortality is 1-3 in 1000 of sick. Plus some people get deaf and some get brain damage (dunno how many now).
So, nowadays super rare, used to be normal and harmless is not a word I would use for someone that kills 1-3 in 1000 kids.
Ceaseless, decades-long propaganda that US is being taken advantage of and that America should come first certainly played a part in inflating that number in minds of a lot of people. When it comes to stuff like this I think that most people just go off the vibes and don't really have any reasonable idea how the budget is divided up.
Russia’s foreign aid is also primarily development assistance, though much less than the US, UK, EU, and China.
Moreover, the US’s larger defence budget also reflects its self-assumed role as the global stability guarantor of the post-war order it built for its own benefit. It’s that order that made the dollar the world’s reserve currency, requiring most of the world to invest in American financial instruments, and which gave it and its companies an outsized advantage for decades.
That was not an international order built for benevolence or which harmed the US. Americans are going to deeply regret how their place in the world and personal wealth shrinks after this administration is done.
I can't parse what you mean by "China and Russia whose GDPs are far larger". Larger than what? China's GDP is about 3/4 that of the USA and Russia is about 1/10th.
Americans also estimate that 30% of the population lives in New York City (https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-m...). I think most people just don't have a numerical intuition for percentages, and don't necessarily intend for a guess of 31% to mean "I think the foreign aid budget is equal to the federal budget times 0.31."
People were surprised that the cost of federal civil service employees was only around 5% in the early DOGE discussions here. They were expecting 20+%. SSA which pays about 70 million people is just over 21% of the spending so far this year, and there are only 2.3 million civil service employees. For civil servants to cost as much in salaries as social security pays out would require them to be paid nearly $800k/year on average.
People are just bad at estimating, and apparently none of the ones making the absurd claims know (or their listeners/readers don't know) that all this data is publicly available.
When we spend $1 trillion a year on our military, just which states was that protecting from invasion? Did the Air Force repel a Dutch beachhead on the Alaskan coast last year that I didn't hear about?
All of that is to protect foreigners. Europe, east Asia, etc. When you hear about the US navy going after pirates off the coast of Somalia, that money wasn't spent protecting US citizens in most cases. When we were dropping drone bombs on ISIS, was ISIS any threat to the US mainland?
And that's just the military. There are so many slush funds going on, I don't think anyone can truly know just how much cash gets sent to or spent on foreigners. I don't think it's quite to 31%, but that guess isn't an order of magnitude high or anything like that.
Don't play dumb, products manufactured in Asia, for US companies, that are then shipped to Europe or elsewhere for sale.
I hate to break it to you but the majority of products sold by US companies are not made in the USA any more. You are welcome to see how well the US economy performs when their is no policing of the world's shipping routes or security around the underseas cables your tech companies rely upon.
>Don't play dumb, products manufactured in Asia, for US companies, that are then shipped to Europe or elsewhere for sale.
That sounds more like it's to China's benefit than the United States' (or Europe's). If that wasn't spent, not only would there be an easier tax burden, but more incentive to manufacture domestically, employing people here.
I've lived my whole life through the China-makes-everything era, and the few pennies people saved getting cheap junk never outweighed the reduction in income they suffered when jobs went away.
>I hate to break it to you but the majority of products sold by US companies are not made in the USA any more.
How are they US companies, if they're selling products manufactured elsewhere, employing 1/50th (or even less) of the workforce they should? They're more like the overseas offices of Chinese companies with an English-friendly name.
>You are welcome to see how well the US economy performs when their is no policing of the world's shipping routes
I've already seen how it performs with the policing. And it can't get any worse for anyone who is in the bottom 90%. It can't get much worse for the greenies worrying about global warming, but failing to put together that making things 12,000 miles away and shipping it across the ocean embiggens the carbon footprint.
Ocean lane policing is the bad solution to a problem we should've never had in the first place, a problem we can get rid of, and it costs too much besides. Saying "but we should protect Chinese profits!" doesn't much change that.
> When we were dropping drone bombs on ISIS, was ISIS any threat to the US mainland?
Yes it was. The primary threat is the illegal drug trade, you know, the one that results in more than 100,000 overdose deaths per year in the US. The drug trade is a huge part of how groups like ISIS get financed. When you take out the group, you take out the people playing the drug trade to finance them, and you weaken the drug trade.
At the end of the day, there's the rules-based international order, and then there's everybody outside it. The law and the outlaws. Outlaws will collaborate to fuel their self-interest. When you weaken some outlaws, you weaken the rest; when you weaken some areas of the law, you weaken the rest as well.
Of course the only reason ISIS existed as any sort of threat was because the village idiots and war criminals Bush Cheney and Rumsfeld invaded Iraq and overthrew their regime.
$750B for defense was 3% of the federal budget in 2024. USA plans to shrink defense budget by 40%, to less than 2%, while asking other NATO members to increase their budgets to 5%.
China plans to spend 7.2% of their budget on defense in 2025.
Russia plans to spend 32.5% of their budget on defense in 2025.
Anyway, it looks like USA is #1 now, but Trump wants to make USA #2 by military spending (with purchasing power parity) by 2030, which is not a smart move in the middle of WWIII.
You better read news from media carefully, especially U.S. news on China:
1. "China's defense budget stays under 1.5% of GDP for years".True.
2. "China will increase its defense budget 7.2% this year".True.
> Yet some analysts have recently argued that China’s defense spending is much larger still, and their new numbers have gained the attention of wider audiences. The Economist has reported that China’s defense spending has already reached two-thirds of U.S. spending and is “catching up quickly.” Then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told Congress in 2021 that “the Russian and Chinese budgets exceed our budgets if all the cards are put on the table.” In September 2023, U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan claimed that China’s defense spending is “probably close to about $700 billion” — three times higher than Beijing’s official defense budget. Apparently worried that China is poised to match or even surpass U.S. spending, Congress introduced legislation in June 2023 calling for the development of new methods for measuring, comparing, and reporting on China’s defense spending.
So, China and Russia increased their military spending a lot, while Trump disarms USA like Zelenskiy did just before fool scale invasion.
What? I'm very curious how people arrived at such a number. I wouldn't be very surprised if people thought it was, say, 5%. But 31% is a wildly implausible number. 15% of people thought it was over half the budget, which is too far from the Lizardman's Constant to just be trolls, but at the same time it's such a wildly high guess that I can't imagine a normal person sincerely making such a guess.