And herein is the crux of the dispute. The U.S. is not Denmark. Our highest tax bracket is what, 39 percent? Compare that with the European countries and you get a skewed picture of giving that favors countries that basically demand money from their own citizens so they can piss it away to the U.N., etc.

In the U.S., citizens give more of their own money because they don't have Uncle Sam squeezing their pocketbooks to take it away from them. Naturally a socialist country is going to look better than a capitalist country, because we don't rely on our government to be a big nanny Santa Claus.

Comparing Denmark's governmental giving per capita to the U.S.'s governmental giving per capita is just as flawed as any other system the U.N. has because it represents fundamental political differences in how citizens are taxed, how their money is spent, and how charity functions.

The estimations early on are that foreign aid from private sources easily exceeds foreign aid from public sources.

http://www.americanoutlook.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=article_detail&id=1183

I agree with the premise of your research. I disagree, though, that only direct cash payments should be counted. Certainly, the entirety of the U.S. military budget shouldn't be counted, either, in that much of it is clearly not "humanitarian aid." However, the use of U.S. military transports to move critical goods, U.S. peacekeepers, funds given to the U.N. for its humanitarian operations, and so forth should certainly be counted. The countries above the U.S. on your list are "stingy" with their services even if they're generous with the cash.

What you could argue, I suppose, is that security aid, like we are providing in Afghanistan, training soldiers and such, is not being counted but should be. There is actually a debate right now among DAC members (the rich countries) about whether to change this. But one shouldn't assume without data that counting it would radically change the picture.

At the Center for Global Development, I run a project called the Commitment to Development Index (www.cgdev.org/rankingtherich). It's a collaboration with Foreign Policy magazine. We rate 21 rich countries on the how much their policies help or hurt poorer countries. We do count troop commitments in Afghanistan, the NATO intervention in Kosovo, the relative ease with which people from poor countries can come to the U.S. to work and send home money, and our relatively open trade policies. We also factor in policies that affect the global environment, technology creation and dissemination, and investment flows.

In doing all this we control for size since it doesn't make sense to ask Denmark to give as much aid as the U.S. where one could argue that the U.S. should give as much per GDP or per person as Denmark. Similarly, one can't expect Denmark to import as much from poorer countries as the U.S., but can argue it should have trade barriers as low.

The point is to do in a serious way what you are arguing for--looking at the bigger picture. In the 2004 edition, the U.S. ties with France, Germany, and Norway for 7th place (out of 21)--not terrible but not where I think the leader of the free world should be.

Beyond that, the fact that we spend as much on our military as we do frees up other Western European nations to be more generous with their public funds.

Further, there's no mention of the amount of private giving by U.S. individuals to aid organizations like the Red Cross, etc.

$1,889,580,423 (36%)

The following year they decided not to donate as much. Instead, they donated...