FOXNews.com | Faux News points out the Bubba Logic (amidst its enraged French-bashing)

Seems that cold, hard numbers can come up on Fox sometimes, although you have to pull them out from the midst of a bashing screed.

The Faux editorial sets the tone early, with verbiage such as "boasting", "one-upping", "vaulting to the lead" with respect to France's communications about their aid to the distressed countries following the tsunami disaster. Typical Faux.

However, Faux then goes on to give considerable credit to French aid programs.

Citing the chief of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Andrew Natsios:

"The aid program in France is not that big," he said. "They do not tend to be dominant figures in the aid. The British are, the European Union is, the Japanese are, we are, the Canadians are."

Said in itself, we can understand "not that big" and "not dominant" as meaning lots of different things with no evident measure to stand by. It's bashing in its purest form.

However, to their credit, Faux goes on to do a little simple research:

"France allotted .41 percent of its gross national income to development aid in 2003, nearly triple the .15 percent from the United States, according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (search)."

I tracked down a free OECD publication for 2004 containing these statistics (go to page 64 for the Development Aid section). The OECD shows that France, with 1/5th the population of the US and 1/7th the GDP of the US, devoted US$7.3bn to development aid while the US devoted US$15.8bn, so that France is somewhat less than half the US. In tems of GDP, the OECD shows the US at at 0.14% aid and France at 0.42%, or roughly 3 times the portion of GDP of the US. So France doesn't give as much in size, but makes three times the effort.

Looking at the other numbers in the OECD statistics, one notices that France is far from leader in the field: Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Norway, Luxembourg and the Netherlands all give more in GDP terms. But what is most noticeable is that the US is dead last in these statistics: the US gives the least in GDP terms of any OECD country. That statistic is lost on Faux news.

Faux reports that the "Natsioso" remark about France:

"They [France]do not tend to be dominant figures in the aid. The British are, the European Union is, the Japanese are, we are, the Canadians are."

Yet when you look at the OECD rankings in dollar terms (graphic on page 91) you see this order for individual countries:


USA
Japan
France
Germany
United Kingdom
Netherlands
Italy
Canada


So France is ahead of everyone except for the USA and Japan. Visibly, the Natsioso big hate machine confuses regions (the EU) for individual countries (UK, part of the EU, France, part of the EU). To that the EU is more dominant than France is like saying the Texas is not as big as the United States: it's comparing an apple to a crate of apples. As for Canada, with half the population of France, it provides one third the aid in dollar terms, 0.26% in GDP terms, so it's behind France on both counts. The UK is closer but still smaller than France in dollar and GDP terms.

In summary, Natsioso's "not dominant, Canada and the UK are bigger" is an outright lie, another amongst many.

What is surprising is to see the United Nations' emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, back down on his cogent remarks. They were right on, but had to be retracted to save US face. The Big Lie must go on!


BTW: I think that France, the EU and most of the OECD countries could do a lot better for development aid. But this should not give credence to the lies about the relative efforts of individual states and should not be used to cover up the hollowness of the US Big Lie.