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tompe - with respect, I still think you do not quite understand what msmith was saying about charitable giving. If you were looking to government foreign aid plus private giving to foreign causes, that ignores most private charity, which is given to unfortunates closer to home.
I don't think that government aid reflects individual virtue. Charitable donors are taking their own money, that could be spent on themselves, and giving it to others. Foreign aid is merely an allocation of tax revenues as to which the individuals in the donor country have no discretion to pay or not pay.
Anyway, I am skeptical about the "goodness" of much foreign aid, as I hinted in my prior comment. It is fairly common for such aid to actually be tied to using donor-country businesses, so it is really a form of taxpayer support of domestic business. Also, most foreign aid goes to poor country governments, and vanishes into corruption and incompetence (after all, one of the main reasons poor countries are poor is that their governments are corrupt and incompetent).
According to the Index of Global Philanthropy published by the Hudson Institute, U.S. private donations just to the developing world are far in excess of government expenditures, amounting in 2006 to about $34 billion. Sweden, for example, which did have a very large government foreign aid program, had about zero private donations (Norway, on the other hand, does have a lot of private donation). The two top countries in private donations to developing countries, per unit of gross national income, were the United States (by a long way) and Ireland.
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