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This is what you get when you have a near-stagnant economy for 8 years and simultaneously import ~1 million low skill/no skill workers through chain migration, immigration lotteries, and God only knows how many through illegal immigrant catch-and-release and the like. These immigrants (legal and illegal) create a glut of low skilled workers, driving down wages for everyone.

The average economy growth rate under Obama was 1.5% or thereabouts. For reference, growth under Regan and Clinton both were north of 3.5% per year (meaning the economy grew far faster than under Obama, since these numbers are compounding year over year). https://www.hudson.org/researc... The growth rate so far under Trump looks to be ~3%, or 2x that of Obama's tenure.

The ODA only focuses on official government aid in calculating it's results. The main problem with that it the US, in general, places a very high value on independence and as such they prefer to donate on an individual front and not through federal committee.

The Index of Global Philanthropy (warning, this is a PDF) gives a much more accurate view of international giving.

To be fair, Sweden is still in the #1 spot as a percentage of GNI, but the numbers are much closer. You'll can also notice most of the top countries on the ODA graph have exceptionally small values for personal donations and the US appears to be the only country where personal donations exceed governmental.

If you measure by the only useful metric there is, per capita charitable donations (which include the private donations your statistics do not) the US crushes everyone. By miles.

http://gpr.hudson.org/files/publications/GlobalPhilanthropy.pdf

The myth that Americans are stingy has been repeatedly debunked and only the most disingenuous individual could argue agans the fact that Americans win on total giving hands down.

First, that metric is fairly useless as it ignores the wealth of the countries and looks only at the dollar amount.
An analogy would be yourself donating $50K to charity and Bill Gates donating the same amount. Who is the more generous?
A much more balanced comparison would be each of you donating X% of your total funds and assets.

So let's take wealth into account (as measured by the GNI) and see what the PDF you linked to says.

Chart I shows that, in 2004, the US net ODA was 0.17% of the GNI.
Chart II shows that the total ODA was $19.7 Billion.
Table I says that the "total economic engagement" was $99 Billion -- I assume that was the data you referred to.

A simple calculation shows that the "total economic engagement" was about 0.85% of the GNI.

As no information for the "total economic engagement" was given for any other country, no meaningful comparisons can be made.
However, the net ODA of Norway (0.87%) and Denmark (0.85%) is already at or above that level.

Also, a non-trivial amount of private donations by Luxembourg (0.83%) and probably Sweden (0.78%) and the Netherlands (0.73%) will put them above that line.

Let's check this. A quick googling found an International Herald Tribune article that says:

Even when measured as a percent of gross national income, the U.S. ranks in the top third when all forms of international giving - official aid, philanthropy and remittances - are counted. (The top two givers are Sweden and Luxembourg.)

I am not a native English speaker but I'd wager a guess that "in the top third" (which usually means somewhere between the 26th and 33rd percentile) is synonymous neither with "crushes everyone by miles" nor with "wins hands down".

So yes, you are not as stingy as some would make you appear but definitely not as generous as you'd like to be viewed.

If you measure by the only useful metric there is, per capita charitable donations (which include the private donations your statistics do not) the US crushes everyone.

By miles.

So I guess when you said "Only if you calculate it the way most favourable to yourself." you were just foreshadowing your post?

http://gpr.hudson.org/files/publications/GlobalPhilanthropy.pdf

The myth that Americans are stingy has been repeatedly debunked and only the most disingenuous individual could argue agans the fact that Americans win on total giving hands down.

I would hardly call Claudia Rosette "freelance" considering that she works for the Hudson Institute, which shilled for the Neo-Wrongs and generally played boosters for the tremendously successful Iraq war. A neo-con think tank like Hudson is an utter failure if it can't plant stories in at least the WSJ and the NRO (indeed that's where it was initially run). In her latest article at the Hudson Institute's website Rosette admits that only Ahmed Chalabi has the documents with the supposed evidence and 4 months later he still won't show them to anybody. Of course it's hard for him find time to get those documents to Rosette what with all palling around with and debriefing the Iran intelligence services in Tehran. Rosette tries to tiptoe away from having been Chalabi'd by making reference to other mysterious "confidential documents the UN is socking away" and to the neo-con picked Duelfer's testimony, without any specific knowledge of the supposed UN documents or where Duelfer got his own info. C'mon man, hasn't this country been fooled enough times by Chalabi's claims?

I have no love for the UN, but I don't think we need a naive conspiracy theory to see why France and Russia didn't want to knock out Saddam:
a) it wasn't in their economic or military interests
b) it was a bad war to get into. Iraq has been the straw that breaks the camel's back for years now, and to try to get right in the middle of it with no real regional or international support was asking for a quagmire, and France and Russia knew it
c) France is big baby in international affairs (mainly it's trying to hang out to some semblance of being a relevant player)

The answer is not to come out with some more Chalabi-promulgated nonsense to try to show that they're in on some global fraud, and it certainly isn't to insert ourselves into the middle of a regional hornet's nest.

I call BS on this.

Africans are dying of AIDS because there is no infrastructure to distribute the drugs that are available.

For Africans, the costs of patented drugs is actually cheaper than the generics made in India and Brazil. And the Fixed Dose combinations offered by the same generic companies wind up being more expensive than the individual drugs made by the patent holders.

Here is an analysis using MSF (Doctors without Borders) own data.

I'd go to the site, but Showtime apparently thinks the internet works like 1920's telephone service. The actual episode in question is one of my favourites.

I have that episode (actually, all of them) handy. I'll present some quotes to help you out:

Charles Margulis, Greenpeace GE specialist: "We're concerned that Genetically Engineered food is a disaster waiting to happen."
"Human beings have never before created lifeforms (plants) in the laboratory and released them into the environment and nobody knows what's going to happen in the long-term either in the environment or in our diets."

Penn: "Created lifeforms, disaster waiting to happen, that's Bullshit! These greenpeace dudes want us to believe that GE crops will ruin other crops and harm any person or animal that eats these foods."

Norman Borlaug: "Producing food for 6.2 billion people, adding a population of 80 million more a year is not simple. We had better develop an ever improved science and technology including the new modern technology to produce the food that is needed for today".

Norman Borlaug: "We're 6.6 billion people now. We can only feed 4 billion. I don't see 2 billion volunteers to disappear." (Regarding organic only foods)

Juliano, Raw Food Chef: "A tortilla is made in a dingy, dirty factory by some dude who hates his job, boss, life, and you. And sends that hate into the food, and you eat it and send it to the center of your core being."

Penn: "Even if this nut had some odd fruit that had grown wild somewhere, it was delivered to him on a truck, it was kept fresh through refrigeration, he washed it in his sink alongside his lettuce tortilla, where did that water come from? He cut it with a knife and cleaned it up with cloth or paper towel. There is no food or water without technology. NONE. Just SHUT THE FUCK UP AND GET A JOB!"

Charles Margulis: "There is no Government requirement that genetically engineered foods be tested in the United States. There's not a single government agency, neither the FDA, USDA, EPA; None of them require genetically engineered foods to be tested for human health effects."

Terry Lomax, professor of botany and plant pathology at Oregon State University: "There are no animal genes in plant crops"

Terry Lomax: "These genetically engineered crops are actually the most highly tested crops that we've ever had. They're regulated by the EPA, the USDA, and the FDA. The EPA regulates them if there's a pesticide involved; The USDA [on] where they're grown and how it will affect the environment, and the FDA for food safety. They go through millions of dollars of testing and many years to be able to be approved as a commercial crop."

Alex Avery, studying global food issues at the Hudson Institute: "The president of Zambia was told by Greenpeace and friends of the earth that the food was poisonous."

Norman Borlaug: "These are utopian people that live on cloud 9 and come into the third world and cause all kinds of confusion and negative impacts on the developing countries"

Penn: "Unless you and yours are starving you need TO SHUT THE FUCK UP".

BTW: Most of the work Norman Borlaug did, for which he was awarded a nobel prize, was done before 1970 (1944, to be accurate). And he's still continuing it, thank God. Oh, and this was the only time Penn got pissed off enough to tell people to shut the fuck up. And I can see why.

Why not donate to help starving people worldwide?

However, this is predicated upon a number of factors, chief among them that world-wide trends will follow the path laid out by us in the first world.

Here's how it has worked here: at around the turn of the century, our life spans here started to go way up; then we all started to get better educated and most of us started putting off having kids til later in life. Then in the middle of the century, women all of a sudden got sick of hanging out at home cleaning up and cooking. So they all went off to college and got jobs, and all of a sudden first-worlders stopped having kids, cause we were all too busy getting smart, getting rich, and having protected sex.

Try to imagine this scenario in India/China/Malawi/Nigeria.

There is no middle class of any substantial size (>20%/population) in any of these countries, and there won't be anytime soon. Therefore the populations will not start shrinking anytime soon. Therefore, when American population has shrunk to 100m, (which it will, barring unforseen catastrophes), most of the world will still be accelerating into a hell-hole of environmental destruction and continued overpopulation.

Yes, there are positive scenarios out there, but no, they are not realistic unless there is a fundamental shift in the way the first world deals with the third world (i.e. reduces exploitation in favor of assistance).

Also, please note that most of the prophets of a smaller world are working for extreme right-wing foundations. The slashdot cited article was by the American Enterprise Institute (radical free market types) and the article I cited was by somebody from the Hudson Institute (very conservative think tank)

That doesn't mean they are wrong, it just means they are all coming from a similar ideological perspective, which, despite protestations to the contrary, CAN affect how science is interpreted.