{"id":1454,"date":"2005-02-10T08:29:11","date_gmt":"2005-02-10T12:29:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1454"},"modified":"2005-02-10T08:29:11","modified_gmt":"2005-02-10T12:29:11","slug":"when-eyeballs-go-sproing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1454","title":{"rendered":"when eyeballs go “sproing!”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Can anyone think of an explanation for the fact,<\/a> (via<\/a>) that, when they are asked to identify the top two recipients of federal government spending, 49% of Americans list “Foreign Aid” as one of them? And, no, it’s not a case of attitudes hardening under Bush. The same pollsters (Harvard and the Washington Post<\/em>), asking the same question in 1997, found 64% of Americans believed that foreign aid was one of the two most expensive things their government does.<\/p>\n\n

I think that overestimating the amount of our money<\/em> going to foreigners<\/em> probably happens in all nations, whether they are proud of their foreign aid, or resent it. But I can’t believe that the discrepancy is as wide anywhere else.<\/p>\n\n

In largely unrelated news, the Guardian<\/em> today reports that there are 110 nukes stored at the American base in Lakenheath, about thirty miles from here. It seems to me that just one would be plenty to deter anyone who wants to bomb Suffolk. The rest of them aren’t really making the world safer.<\/p>\n\n

Actually, these stories may not be entirely unrelated. Given that Americans tend to believe that their armies abroad are benign, and helping the countries that they are in, perhaps the distinction between “defence” — correctly identified by 74% as among the largest parts of government spending — and “foreign aid” is not as clear emotionally as it might be. At least in the case of Israel, the largest recipient of foreign aid, the distinction is hard for anyone to discern.<\/p>\n\n

But I still think it’s a remarkable delusion to be so completely wrong about the figures involved.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Can anyone think of an explanation for the fact, (via) that, when they are asked to identify the top two recipients of federal government spending, 49% of Americans list “Foreign Aid” as one of them? And, no, it’s not a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1454"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1454\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}