I take issue with Jonah Goldberg’s assessment of America being “simply a lot more generous than most other countries.” He’s talking about individual private donations, in which case, Americans are very charitable and generous.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University in New York quotes figures showing that the 400 richest Americans earned an average of $174 million each in 2000 or $69 billion total. That’s more than the total incomes of the populations of Nigeria, Senegal, Uganda and Botswana together, estimated at 167 million people. The fact that Americans are willing to give up spare change should be no surprise. The surprise is that average Americans have no clue how much our government actually does give.

The perception that the U.S. is the most generous country in the world is a view held by a majority of Americans according to a 2001 poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes based at the University of Maryland. According to the poll, average Americans believe the U.S. spends 24 percent of its budget on foreign aid to developing countries. At 0.22 percent gross national income far less than 0.7 percent, what the U.S. actually gives is 20 times less than what Americans perceive.

At the 2005 G8 summit, the big push was to get the wealthy eight countries to raise their level of commitment to 0.7 percent as part of a deal to meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. Five countries have met or surpassed the 0.7 percent mark: Denmark 0.81 percent, Luxembourg 0.87 percent, Netherlands 0.82 percent, Norway 0.93 percent and Sweden 0.92 percent. According to these figures, the US. Is not the most generous. I would argue that the Europeans have a right to “defend their comparative stinginess.” Mr. Goldberg’s commentary adds to the misperception of American as the most generous nation.

Alison Johnson

Birch Harbor