Guest: Whose Ambivalence?
Erin Scharff is a former Eisendrath Legislative Assistant at the Religious Action Center. She now works with Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The views expressed are her own.
The New York Times is once again running a series on wealth in America. (I had that the style section would be enough coverage, but that's another story. Last week, they looked at tax breaks for charitable donations (always an interesting topic.) As a guest, I probably shouldn't bore you with my overly wonky interest in tax policy, but I do think it's important to call the Times out when the perpetuate a myth.
The Times wrote that Americans are "at best ambivalent about using tax dollars in such assistance." But, this simply isn't true.
Americans vastly over-estimate how much we spend. In a 2002 poll by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and the German Marshall Fund, the median estimate for foreign aid was twenty-five percent. Only two percent of Americans correctly guess that we actually spend less than 1% of our budget.
Nevertheless, Americans are still willing to spend their tax dollars to fight poverty. According to a study by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policies Attitudes, a majority of Americans support spending American tax dollars to pursue the Millennium Development Goals to end poverty in the developing world. Over eighty percent of Americans support a plan to reduce world hunger in half by 2015, and most of these people would be willing to pay more taxes to reach that goal.
It's statistics like this that make me proud to be an American. If only our policy makers and opinion makers would take heed.
P.S. I wrote the Public Editor to correct the piece. I'll let you know if I get a response.