There was a study of sitting US Congressmembers and they were asked what their constituents believe ("What do you think is the approval rating of Medicare in your district" for example).
Basically, Democrats in solid blue districts believe that they represent a red district and Republicans believe that they represent the most far-right district in the country.
There were two big ones, I bookmarked only this one;
In 2013, researchers from Northwestern University and Stanford found that state legislators throughout the U.S. wildly overestimated the conservatism of their constituents. Republicans were more liable to have a deluded sense of how many of their voters’ wanted to abolish the welfare state, but even Democrats had a tendency to look at their blue districts and see purple or red: On average, legislators from both parties underestimated the level of support for universal health care in their districts by more than 15 percentage points.
https://scholars.org/contribution/politicians-think-american-voters-are-more-conservative-they-really-are
Yeah America does not need re-education. There was never any education to begin with. :agony-soviet:
I do have to wonder about that poll, like, if you take the average of responses, then it'd be very difficult to get anywhere near 1% or 99%. Like if the correct number is 1% and you ask 100 people and 95 say 1% but the other 5% say like 90%, then the average would be 5.45%. A small number of people being really misinformed or trolling can have a really big effect if you're looking at extremes like that, and that could explain why the estimates are way higher when the answer is a low number and way lower when the answer is a high number. When the answers are between like 35% and 65%, the estimates are a lot more accurate.I did all that analysis then scrolled down and saw that they also give the median responses and it's pretty much just as bad lmao. Maybe slightly better.
No wonder there's so many screen shots on :reddit-logo: /r/shitamericanssay of yankees whining about the rest of the world being dependent on them. They think they're spending a quarter of their money propping them up lol
no it's dumber than that Americans seem to think their military spending somehow allows the rest of the world to not spend money on the military
it's true, we probably wouldn't have social democracies up here in Scandinavia if we spent $1.5 trillion every year on self-destructing planes
that is true although some might say that we should simply spend less money on killing people
Most of that “foreign aid” is slush funds for soft power bribes and IMF enslavement. Most nations that receive “foreign aid” from the Amerikkkan empire would be better off without it and more economically independent. Most people probably consider the CIA/NED funding separatists in Xinjiang and Hong Kong “foreign aid”.
What perverse people Americans. Using their dollar to enslave the world and then acting like they are the victims for it. Oh woe is me my government that keeps me fat and happy is giving away too much food to the thralls I sit atop (ignoring that the food is so meager as to keep the thralls on the brink of starvation and asking for more).
on top of this, this "aid" is also dwarfed by the amount of money that flows the other way, even if you dont count the suppressed wages and destroyed living standards in the developing world (usually as a result of western imperialism) subsidising cheap consumer goods in the west
Foreign aid is when the tax money of poor people in rich countries are given to the rich people of poor countries to protect themselves from their own poor people
I wanna do the "Americans are stupid" spheel but this is a direct result of consent manufacturing. No way Americans would think about foreign aid if propaganda machine wasn't constantly pushing xenophobia.
gotta love the propaganda machine deciding to destroy American finance imperialism and the IMF because the bourgoise thought it seemed to much like helping people
Also a ton of that 1% is soft power and CIA shit, like giving funds to NED affiliates.
Americans are just dumb enough that they think the military budget also counts as foreign aid.
Foreign aid in 2019: $39.2 Billion
Aid to Ukraine alone in 2022: $48 Billion
Official development aid (ODA) flows are a joke. Most of the global north can't even be bothered to meet their own promised target of a whole 0.7% of GNI. What aid they do give is usually just in the form of agricultural price dumping that destroys local farmers, which in turn creates dependency on more foreign aid.
The US loves doing this for imperialist reasons. In Haiti for example, we came in and killed all the native pigs on the island because "they could have a disease" (most didn't) then dumped a bunch of excess agricultural products that wiped out the rest of the Haitian agricultural sector. A pig used to be the most valuable thing a Haitian peasant would own, now they all have to work in foreign owned sweatshops because they can't compete with American megafarms that are allowed to engage in anti-competitive practices under he guise of "aid". Agricultural corporations also lobby the government hard for this type of "aid" because they are just offloading surplus product anyway, with the bonus of destroying any future competition. If we actually wanted to help, we'd give these places tractors, technology and raw capital. But everyone handwrings about "corruption" whenever a poor country is given something more than our table scraps.
Also the CIA loves planting their agents and saboteurs in the USAID teams that distribute all this cheap food, so most countries would literally be better off if they just set all the "aid" on fire and expelled the aid workers from the country. But if you do that your country will get painted as a "dictatorship that wants it's people to starve" by the imperialist media apparatus like Venezuela or DPRK did.
The biggest source of foreign aid and by far the most effective for actually improving people's lives is remittances. That's simply just migrant workers sending money to their families back home. And, of course, migrant workers are almost universally treated like trash and underpaid wherever they are. But the millions of them that send whatever they can back home are doing more to develop the global south than the entirety of the capitalist world's official aid is. It's pathetic.
I'm pretty sure that, if you conducted similar polls on a variety of major budget items, then totaled all the percents, you'd get a number well over 100%.
