[grannyg00se]

"First, polls have shown that U.S. citizens drastically overestimate the amount of the federal budget allocated to foreign aid. As I recall, the average estimate is 25%; the reality is less than 0.1%."

That is very hard to believe. Why would anybody think that the government gives away a quarter of its budget? I would think that a guess would be based that on something reasonable. Like your own personal or family budget for instance. Who would (or could) give away a quarter of their family budget? Not many I'm guessing. I would expect guesses between 1 and 10 percent. Twenty five percent sounds like a polling error. Or a missed decimal place.

[edavis]

From a November 2010 WordPublicOpinion.org poll (http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/nov10/ForeignAid_...)

"Just based on what you know, please tell me your hunch about what percentage of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. You can answer in fractions of percentage points as well as whole percentage points."

Results: Mean = 27%, Median = 25%

And my favorite part: "What do you think would be an appropriate percentage of the federal budget to go to foreign aid, if any?": Mean = 13%, Median = 10%

[notJim]

I think when you provide people with absolutely no context like this, you're bound to get stupid answers. I feel like if you instead gave a list of things the government should do and asked people to allocate money to each, you would at least get answers that are sane, if not accurate.

And honestly, knowing this kind of stuff is kind of irrelevant anyway. The whole reason we have a representative democracy is so that ordinary citizens can delegate the specifics of government to experts.

[calibraxis]

I think it's more of a matter of disinformation; if US citizens are radically disinformed, that's another barrier to participating in allocating our budgets. The system obviously favors decisionmaking by wealthy elites.

(Affording your own decent healthcare is enough of a feat in the US, that if you're wealthy enough to chip in for some of other people's healthcare too, people think you must be Batman or something.)

As for Bill Gates in particular, apparently one problem is his support for intellectual property, though his foundation. Many consider IP (particularly patents) a major problem for world health; and certainly the US knew better than to respect other countries' intellectual property, while it was developing. (To Charles Dickens' consternation.) (http://keionline.org/microsoft-timeline)

[3am]

Why didn't you just google it? It probably took me less time to find http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2676 than it did for you to type up your response.

This is how dumb the American public is: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/03/20/how-dumb-ar...

[grannyg00se]

I did google it and found some polls but nothing that I would consider reliable data.

Maybe my disbelief is too strong.

But judging from the responses and the indications about average knowledge, I'm starting to wonder whether democracy in such an ignorant society is a good idea. P

[3am]

Democracy, the worst system of government - except for the alternatives. But when ~1/3 of people believe in ghosts, it can test one's resolve :)

[silverlake]

"[Americans] overestimate spending on foreign aid by a factor of 25, according to a 2010 survey." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020347100457714...

[recursive]

Because the USA is the best country in the world.