Quote:
Originally Posted by kane
I'm not saying that we haven't made mistakes and done things for selfish reasons. If a hurricane wreak's havoc on a country, I'm confident that one of the first calls they make is to the US looking for help.
Look at the tsunami in Indonesia. We weren't alone, but any stretch of the imagination, but we sent some of our navy there to help and we ended up giving about 2.825 billion in aid. Of that 1.8 billion came directly from people through donations. That number doesn't include the cost of the military people we sent to help. The next closest country in aid was Aus at 1.3 billion. Germany gave 1.3 billion. The UK gave 800 million and Canada gave 750 million.
By comparison, China, who is in that region and supposedly has the fastest growing economy in the world gave 146 million.
Another example could be Haiti. After the earthquake there the US has donated $41 million dollars. The next closest is Sweden with $10 million and the UK at $8 million. These dollar amounts represent money from the government. Now let's look at money contributed by actual individuals who gave cash from their pocket. The people of the US donated 1.17 billion dollars to Haiti with another $86 million coming from the Red Cross. The next closest country was Canada with $163 million then a European Commission with $159 million.
When it comes to natural disasters we seem to be the one that steps up, sends people, supplies and money to help. I'm not saying other countries don't, clearly they do and many countries are not the same size as us so they can't do as much, but we are often looked upon to lead the way.
What I am getting at is that while there are some that hate us and think the US is a laughing stock there are still millions trying to come here and we seem to be one of, if not the, first country they turn to when they need help because of a disaster or because of a military threat. In many people's eyes we are still a great country and we are admired.
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I honestly do not think we (as a country) are admired around the world.
I do however believe the rest of the worlds governments put on a good 'game face' when it comes to wanting our money, money that we should be keeping in our own country for our own national disasters such as failing education rates, homeless levels increasing and poor unemployment figures.
Imagine if just 10% of the money we gave to other countries for disaster relief efforts was used to better the country itself, from infrastructure right the way up through the economy, job creation and education...
There is an old saying 'charity begins at home' it seems like we have forgotten that, especially when it comes to assisting countries that quite honestly, are a hotbed of in-fighting and general clusterfucks overall, with or without natural disasters.
As country we waste so much money on useless crap, wars, election campaigning, etc... Why does it cost a guy over 10M to lose a presidential election?