The key word being here "initially".
The American aid figure for the current disaster is now $35 million, and we applaud Mr. Bush's turnaround. But $35 million remains a miserly drop in the bucket, and is in keeping with the pitiful amount of the United States budget that we allocate for nonmilitary foreign aid. According to a poll, most Americans believe the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 percent.
Bush administration officials help create that perception gap. Fuming at the charge of stinginess, Mr. Powell pointed to disaster relief and said the United States "has given more aid in the last four years than any other nation or combination of nations in the world." But for development aid, America gave $16.2 billion in 2003; the European Union gave $37.1 billion. In 2002, those numbers were $13.2 billion for America, and $29.9 billion for Europe.
Source NY Times
Seems you are at least twice as 'stingy' as we are.
Thanks for playing, anyways...
Non-Military foreign aid, that is what those figures are. Do you realize how much we spend in Military man power to help struggling countries?
People in disaster areas are disorganised, the US, along with other countries spend a great deal of money on Military foreign aid each year to place troops,military engineers and the like in the countries in which these things happen.
Troops provide security, carry the major load of reconstruction in some cases, and do all the dirty work which the ailing country needs done. Leadership is provided to get things back on track as quickly as possible. These services are invaluable, and most of the money for these things comes out of US citizens pockets. Not British, or Frenchmens pockets, US pockets.
And it's all free to the ailing country. And yet these countries are unappreciative.
We are a single country, the EU is 25 or 28, there is no reason they shouldn't have fronted more money to begin with. And shouldn't end up putting more into the bucket in the end.
Development aid has nothing to do with this crisis, this is disaster relief. After the clean-up then there will be developmental aid.
It makes no sense that a 25 Nation Union cannot afford anymore than twice what the US provided.
And I picked up on your sarchasm at the end there, those types of things are things that get people heated, and in turn cause problems, keep it to yourself from now on.
There is no reason we can't hold a discussion and keep sarchasm out of it.